<Begin Segment 4>

BN: But one thing that I did want to ask you about, as I said, you first appear on the staff in the June/July 1970 issue, I think Mike mentioned was the one issue that didn't come out. There was one month that was missed, so that was a combined issue. But then you have a photo credit in '71 for the first time, but you don't have a first credit for a writer until like November of '72.

JF: Wow.

BN: But then subsequently, for the last year and a half, you're one of the most frequent contributors, you have a lot of articles subsequently. So what I was going to ask you is just especially in the first couple of years, you described kind of a staff meeting, but how did a typical issue come together? Because Gidra, there's no listed editor, there's no hierarchy, so what happens? Like okay, you've put an issue out, you're now going to put out the next issue, what is the process or how does that issue come together?

JF: I think for a while, this may be late, like the last couple of years of the paper's existence, we assigned editors, but they're not that particular...

BN: They're not noted anywhere in the paper, but this is an internal thing.

JF: Yeah. And I'm not sure if that was voluntary or "voluntold," but somehow... and it was usually, at least two people work in tandem to make sure that a paper got produced. So they'd be in charge of putting the articles, soliciting the articles and making sure that follow-through to commitments made earlier in the month would be there at press time. So it's kind of a... because you knew you were responsible, you made sure it got done. I think if it were completely free, I think a lot of those people, probably me included, would kind of slack off and nothing would ever got done. We think about it a lot, though, but as far as actually following through and submitting whatever it was, then you had to hold people's fire, feet to the fire, so to speak. And that was the responsibility of the editors that month. Did that answer your question?

BN: Kind of.

JF: How an article came together?

BN: And then like how big a core group are we talking about? I mean, are you assigned to be the editor like every three months or four months or six months? Like how...

JF: You know, I can't remember clearly how often it was, but at least three times a year maybe. Or maybe every four months or so, we'd rotate. But you never worked with the same person.

BN: So you're paired up with someone different each time?

JF: Yeah. At least that's the way I remember it.

BN: And then if you're the editor for that month or you and the other person, do you have kind of final say on this article yes, this article no, or was that all just...

JF: [Laughs] Organically, yeah. I think there might be an informal get-together about, "Oh shit, what's happening next month?" And so then, okay, then kind of a list of known events is generated, and then we'd find out, oh, "Maybe Colin, he's a part of this group. Maybe we'll contact him and find out if he can put something together to cover that." And so you kind of put the responsibility on the people closest to the event. Hopefully they're a participant and have some interest in the event and the organization that they could speak about the larger issue that the event is addressing. But yeah, we just made sure that we covered events that were known or planned for. I recall being responsible for the calendar a couple of months, and Alan Ota and... well, primarily Alan, he was very focused on the style, the look and feel, so to speak, of the paper. And I remember him experimenting a lot with the way articles would be laid out and fonts used, and I guess newspaper culture that I wasn't even aware of. And so that was an aspect that not a lot of the staff members were into, but Alan certainly was. And so I tried experimenting with other styles, too. Of course, we looked at other newspapers and got some ideas from them. But the look and feel of the paper, it fell to, I guess, just a few people who were interested in that aspect of it. Otherwise, you get the typesetting done and get the layout in.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.