The Granite Beat: Mike Cote on journalism and the 'art of the column'

Readers of Granite State newspapers will likely recognize the name of Mike Cote as an editor with the New Hampshire Union Leader, where he worked for 11 years. Earlier this year, though, he made a career shift. He left the daily newspaper life for that of monthly periodicals so he could take the role of New Hampshire editor for Yankee Publishing, where he leads the teams behind New Hampshire Magazine and the New Hampshire Business Review.

Learn about Cote and his advice on this episode of Granite Beat with Adam Drapcho and Julie Hirshan Hart.

This article has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Adam Drapcho: Could you tell us how you first became interested in journalism and how you found a foothold in that career?

Mike Cote: I’ll give you my true standard answer. I had a bachelor’s degree in English and communication, and I needed a job. So I eventually got a graduate degree in journalism, mostly just to get access to internships and freelance and correspondent work, that kind of thing. That was my path. It wasn’t like I always wanted to be a journalist. I knew fairly early on that writing was my strength. I just didn’t know what to do with it.

Drapcho: And how did you find your way into journalism?

Cote: Well, I was a janitor for the University of New Hampshire. And after I finished school, I continued working there for another year. I mowed lawns, took out the trash and, frankly, did a lot of nothing. I used to get to sit in the basement and read books, and then they’d call down there if they needed me to go pick up something for them. It was a pretty good gig — great benefits, low pay. But it was fun. My wife at the time was finishing school, and we ended up both going to Colorado because her older brother lived out there. He was also somebody who was in transition and was studying to be an electrical engineer and working full time during the day. So we shared a house with him, and I went to the University of Colorado-Boulder, and got some freelance work, internships — things like that. I had a path, finally, but it wasn’t always. I think I was 26 when I had my first full time newspaper job.

Drapcho: What was it like to come back and work for the paper for the hometown that you grew up in?

Cote: It was very surreal. And I’d say I’ll start with what my mom teases me about. The Union Leader is a great newspaper, and I loved the people that I worked with who did objective and strong journalism. And they continue to do that. I’m very proud of the team there and the people I worked with. But I grew up with the Union Leader in the era of Loeb. I delivered the paper as a kid, and back then the reputation of the paper was a little bit different. When William Loeb was putting stories and editorials on the front page, it was fairly radical right-wing. He liked to blow stuff up and sell papers by being a little bit extreme. And Manchester was a place for me that I wanted to escape from. So I don’t remember saying this, but my mother does. She says two things. She said “You’d never move back to Manchester and never work for the Union Leader.” So I’ve done them both. And they both turned out to be a pretty good thing. On your resume, if you have some gaps that are like months, not years, they don’t really tell your whole story. Well, my resume had a five-month gap when I was unemployed. I came here with no job, and I was lucky to find one in a month. Because there was a quarter-page ad in the Union Leader for pretty much a job that I had done for many years.

Drapcho: Could we start by having you tell us when you began writing columns, and I’m curious if you started that because you wanted to, or because it was part of the description of the job that you had at the time?

Cote: I started writing a weekly column when I was business editor of the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado. I worked there for 11 years, and nine of those years I was business editor. When I worked for the Union Leader in a similar role, both of those columns were something that had not existed before. I think the previous business editor, when I was in Boulder, had thought about writing a column, maybe wrote one or two, but once you start writing it every week, you’re kind of married to it. So I don’t know how many I wrote over 11 years — 50 columns, 48 columns a year, or something like that. And similar for the Union Leader.

In between I wrote a monthly Editor’s Note column for ColoradoBiz for five years. I’m a much better columnist when I’m writing more than when I’m writing less. I think when you’re writing just a monthly column, you think about it like bands that don’t put out records for five years. They’re not working on a record for five years, they’re working on a record for two weeks before they put out the album or something. That’s just inevitable with deadlines. And now I’m trying to strike that balance. I’m writing an Editor’s Note about once a month. I’ve written one column for New Hampshire Business Review. Ultimately, I’ll probably do like a monthly one, maybe just do two. It’s kind of a crushing schedule to write every week. We’ll see how much I can manage with everything else.

Getting back to your original question, the art of a column is that you tend to follow your crazy ideas. If you’re writing an essay, if you’re writing anything, you should have fun doing it. And no one ever has ever told me what the column should be about, or write about this, write about that. There may be an occasional suggestion, but for the most part, you’re on your own. So if you’re writing about something, and you realize, “I wish I hadn’t chosen this particular subject or person to interview,” or whatever, and it’s not going anywhere, it’s your own fault. But I can’t say I’ve never had that problem ever, but if you’re talking to somebody who’s passionate about what they do, you’ll find a way, you’ll find something from it that you can work with.

I don’t write a lot of columns that are personal essays. I’m doing that more with the Editor’s Note, because it’s kind of the nature of columns for New Hampshire Magazine. But even for New Hampshire Magazine, I wrote one column that was really an interview with an artist. Her name is Sarah Richard, she’s a Nashua comic book artist and author. She wrote a kind of creepy book called, I think “The Graveyard Handbook” — I don’t have it in front of me here. But I interviewed her and she kindly let us use one of the images from her book to go with my column, which was so much fun.

I’m giving you a long answer, but you want to have fun with it. I’ll tell you one last thing about following your crazy ideas. Back when Napster, in the early, early years before iTunes, and college kids were getting accused of stealing music and the music industry was suing them. It was crazy. I got it into my head one morning — what if I changed all the words to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to tell this Napster story in a column? And I did. It was a fun column and so much so that even in the early days of the internet, it somehow found the attention of a musician from I think New Mexico or Arizona. Anyway, he asked me if he could record it. So I have a CD of this very, very professionally produced recording of this version. It’s called “Subterranean Record Store Blues.” He named his band the Strokers. It’s really good. He changed one word because I veered away from a rhyme scheme, and he changed it in a way where it should have been. So he made a slight edit, but that kind of stuff is fun. That’s why writing can bring you a lot of joy. And you know that the journey is so much part of the fun.

Julie Hirshan Hart: What advice would you have for someone who’s interested in starting their career in journalism?

Cote: I taught at the University of Colorado off and on for about 10 years — writing, editing and design, mostly reporting. And I’d always tell students, “Why do you want to do this? This is an industry in a death spiral. Why are you doing this?” A lot of these classes were filled with primarily students who were in the public relations/advertising track, but there would always be a handful of kids, maybe four or five of 18, who wanted to be reporters in some way. Their answers were always great — “This is what I want to do, and I’m going to find a way to do it.” You need to be versatile. And you need to know how to do a bunch of different things. And remember that this is an industry that’s hard to find work paths.

When I started off the paths were still in place, this is a while ago, but the paths are gone. Like when I went to school, I got internships, and I got some correspondent work, and those things gave me contacts and helped me find a job. And it was an era where, if you wanted to go to the next level, you could move to a bigger paper, or become a manager of a small paper and write and stay. I was more of the latter side, because I had children, and we wanted to stay in communities that we wanted to live in and not be in a big city where maybe the journalism opportunities were stronger, but the living conditions weren’t so great. So I kind of moved around and was able to do that. Now, everything’s different. And I think if you want to do this you should find another path that you can do also along with journalism.

If I had a child who was pursuing this, I’d say you’d have to have something else alongside it that you can do or get a specialty like business reporting — there’s always been a demand for that. Have more than one degree so that you can use that expertise for journalism, but also be entrepreneurial. It’s a much different world now, and we haven’t seen where it’s going. There are grant-funded opportunities newspapers have used. We have the Granite State News Collaborative, which our company is a part of, which is great, we’re able to share things. But no one’s come up with a model yet that will make journalism as we know it thrive.

Hirshan Hart: And Mike, our last question for you. Where can people go to see more of your work?

Cote: NHBR.com and newhampshiremagazine.com. I don’t have my own personal website yet, but certainly our brands are out there, and we have email newsletters for all our products. And also our friends at Yankee, we’re easy to find.

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This article is part of The Granite Beat, a project by The Laconia Daily Sun and The Granite State News Collaborative, of which Laconia is a partner. On each episode Adam Drapcho and Julie Hirshan Hart will explore with local reporters how they got some of the most impactful stories in our state and why they matter. This project is being shared with partners in The Granite State News Collaborative.