Amanda Haggard and Linda Bailey are the co-editors of The Contributor.
Haggard first started working at the paper in 2013 and currently is contracted to edit the news features, oversee the assignments of all freelance stories and also takes the pen to paper for several lead articles a year — all while working a separate full-time job and taking care of a young daughter.
Bailey started in 2011, after a fellow journalist, WPLN’s Blake Farmer, sent her a job posting. With the exception of a one-year hiatus in 2017, Bailey has been editing vendor writing and handling the paper’s design and layout ever since. She recently completed her 300th issue. She also oversees the annual Where To Turn In Nashville booklet and handles a multitude of tasks at the Contributor office to support staff, vendors and volunteers.
Both editors have strong backgrounds in journalism: Haggard attended Middle Tennesee State University and Bailey attended Abilene Christian University in Texas, both studying journalism.
“A good testament to us working well together is that I always think she’s doing all the hard stuff and I’m doing all the easy stuff, and I think she thinks the opposite,” Bailey said. “We really have a good system down, and I’m just grateful for her.”
They have now worked together for more than a dozen years through various iterations of the newspaper.
“Having people around [like Linda] with the longevity to be able to give that kind of historical knowledge of the paper is really unheard of in most newsrooms,” Haggard said. “The people who have been around as long as Linda and I are being cut out in almost every other organization.”
What got you interested in homelessness?
Amanda: Until I worked with the paper, I don’t know if I really accepted how precarious my childhood living situations were. My family always worked really hard, but we had a lot of challenges. My dad was incarcerated, my brother had a chronic illness that was expensive, and most times were pretty tight for us and I remember feeling the strain of that in our household pretty constantly.
Being involved with the paper and around people in active homelessness reiterated what I knew from experience, which is that almost everything is set up against people who are poor. I think I knew most people were trying their very best, but the proximity helped remind me how close we all are.
Linda: My very first job here was editorial assistant and that entailed me getting a pile of handwritten vendor submissions, transcribing them digitally, and then sending them to our editor at the time, Andrew Krinks. I had never seen such raw expression on paper, and I learned so much by reading true, uninhibited thoughts of people and what they were feeling and thinking and caring about.
They truly covered every range of topic from deep personal essays about trauma to what happened to a sports team or anything Ray [Ponce de Leon, the Contributor’s first ever vendor] wrote that was pure comedy. It really opened my mind to the fullness and wholeness of people experiencing homelessness and that there’s not just one thing or one person or one type of thing happening.
Getting these submissions led to me actually meeting people and developing relationships. Growing up in a southern religious tradition, I had obviously done volunteer work with people experiencing homelessness, but I had never done it long enough to develop relationships with people and learn what life is like.
The Contributor vendors helped me grow up because they taught me really everything I know about life. Everything that I care about I learned by reading their work and having friendships. Some I still have today.
What message do you hope The Contributor newspaper gets across to its readers?
Amanda: I don’t attempt to get across a particular message with the issues that we put together. Linda and I over the past few years have come to talking about the paper as a record of what it was like to live in the city during the time that we published the paper.
To me, an ideal issue looks like a mix of writing, poetry and artwork from people who sell the paper. We try to make that the dominant portion of the paper over traditional content. I think we would always choose to elevate what the vendors are thinking about and wanting to provide voice to.
We also want to provide a record of everything that’s going on in the city as best we can with a small staff. That’s the coverage of major systemic issues in the city, or even in the state or in the nation. For example, what the Trump administration is doing or how SNAP benefits are not administered properly. Both affect our vendors and people outside of the paper.
The other thing is, we always want to make sure the paper feels sellable to a vendor. We keep in mind what they might want to hold up and sell on the streets. Things like the coverage of the World Cup might not seem relevant to The Contributor at first glance, but that was appealing to our vendors. We want to make sure the paper is an item they can sell.
We’ve had a couple of brushes with vendors who were not comfortable holding up a paper that said a certain thing. It’s less about the message and more about trying the best way we can to include the vendors and keeping a record of what’s going on in the city.
Linda: I agree with all of that. A message I hope people get when they read the paper is that people experiencing homelessness have thoughts and opinions and stories, and they gain a lot from having a place to put those. I think it is important for Nashville to have that voice represented, and we’re really able to do that. That’s special and meaningful.
And then I hope that people get the message that print media is super cool and important and matters and should still exist, and that if you are able to hold and read a physical newspaper that you’re lucky and you should want to keep doing that. There is this historical right to have a press and being able to read thoughts and trust people to present you with news and stories. I just think it matters.
Who are your main audiences?
Amanda: Vendors are definitely our main audience for the paper because we want them to feel represented. We also want the stories we write and have freelancers do to feel relevant to vendors at the time that they’re selling the paper. That’s a good guidepost.
I care way more about what Norma thinks when she reads the paper than a Metro Council person, for example. Generally, I think our audience is made up of people who care about homelessness and also about physical media. To the extent that people consider themselves a regular reader or not depends on where our vendors are and where people can get the paper.
Linda: I agree with that. When I am thinking about who I care most about to like this issue or respond to it, I think of vendors buying the paper on release day. I also think about whether I am able to explain to a vendor why we are covering something, and if I can’t then we might rethink if we should do it that way or not.
The vendors often give us the perspective from the customers who are buying the paper because we don’t always get to hear from them to the same level that the vendors do. A big audience that Amanda and I found out about recently are Spanish speakers, which is why we’ve moved our Spanish page to the back page. It came from vendor input when the vendor leadership team told us that whenever we put Spanish in the paper, they sell more because they have a lot of customers who speak Spanish and then they know that this is for them.
Readership of hard copies and actual newspapers is declining across the globe. But The Contributor’s concept is based on the physical sales that allow vendors to make an income. How does The Contributor maneuver through this external threat?
Amanda: I have to be honest; this question hurt my heart a little bit. Over the years, I’ve occasionally had this internal conversation and struggle about how much longer we can continue printing a paper, particularly during COVID. We were the only street paper still printing a physical copy of the paper. We maintained that throughout almost all of COVID. We weren’t selling as many papers, of course, but vendors really love the paper.
I’ll have those thoughts, and then I’ll talk to a vendor I’ve known forever, and it seems they’re not deterred at all. They might talk about being frustrated with sales, but they’re also not convinced that putting the paper online is doing them any good. In some ways I think our paper’s vendors are like the most pure and lasting supporters of physical media we still have out there. They put faith in this thing every day, and that allows me to maneuver any idea of an external threat.
Linda: I think our vendors are truly incredible salespeople because they are making selling a printed newspaper work for them to have their income and get the things that they need. It’s a true testament to how good they are with connecting to people. And then, we do really think through the content, and it’s not just things you could get anywhere else. It is unique to us.
We’ve also done a lot of good in the last couple of years connecting with other people who really care about physical media and print products. Expanding into Zine creation [through the UnZine Nashville project] is a good example of that and connecting with other artists and creatives who respond to that. We get into their networks of people who appreciate a printed product, and when they see the paper, [they] want to buy it.
How do you respond to folks who say they would buy it and read it but cannot find it?
Linda: I understand that can be a barrier, but there are certain spots that I know if you go to those places, you will likely find someone like on Music Circle or at the Dickerson Pike Walmart. And we’re trying to do things like getting an interactive map that can give [readers] some ideas of where some of the vendors sell.
Amanda: My advice is that when you find a vendor, that’s your vendor. And so it’s about you, the reader, needing to find a person to build a relationship with. This is not about your convenience, which sounds like a harsh thing to say, but I think whenever somebody tells me they can’t find the paper, what I find out is that they actually didn’t look very hard for it.
I see vendors out, but I also know exactly what to look for and what their badge looks like. Some of it is just familiarizing yourself with what our vendors look like and the badge that they should be wearing.
If you had all the resources you need, what are some changes you’d like to see?
Amanda: When I first started working for the paper, it’d be like, “My goal is for this paper one day to not exist, so homelessness will be gone.” [Now] I don’t really think that we end homelessness by stopping all the efforts we made to build a community over the years. You don’t build something just to take it away once it works.
I’m thinking more in terms of how the organization keeps building in a way that supports more people getting into housing but doesn’t necessarily negate the need for a community for people who are struggling.
If we had all the resources we needed at the paper, I think we would just build on top of what we already have on the editorial side of things. We do a lot with a little right now, but since Linda and I took over in this iteration in 2018, I feel it’s worked pretty well for the vendors.
Linda: Working in nonprofit and probably journalism in general, we are often flexible around a tight budget and tight resources. It would be really cool to do this work from a place of abundance. It would be really cool for our vendors to live a life of abundance. That’s what I think about with all the resources we need, that we wouldn’t just have to be scrapping all the time.
And then, I just want people to care more and demand more for their neighbors [to] help make society better for everyone. But that’s my idealistic view of things.
What is one thing about The Contributor that you think would surprise its readers?
Amanda: My experience is that people are often pretty surprised to learn that there’s really only a few of us producing the paper regularly. That’s kind of broadly, though, across journalism. It’s often a little bit surprising, particularly with physical media, and we use an incredible copy editor at The Contributor. Laura allows us to have a stop gap, but we don’t have multiple layers of editing. Most newspapers don’t anymore.
Readers might also be surprised [to learn] that this is my second job that I mostly do on nights and weekends. Occasionally it comes up because I might not be able to email back at 8 a.m. because I have to do something else as well for work.
Linda: Readers would probably be surprised to know that I get submissions to the paper written on things like napkins or a bag of coffee beans or really any scrap of paper. That’s how important it is for someone to write down what they think and want to express and get it to me. That surprised me when I started.
What is one thing about you that you think would surprise the vendors who sell The Contributor?
Linda: It’s so hard for me at this point to predict what will surprise people. I’ve been so wrong before. But I mentioned recently at a paper release meeting that I studied journalism in college and Norma, who I’ve known for at least a decade, was like, “I had no idea. That’s really cool.”
We’re not just two like nice ladies who decided to start a newspaper, but we have journalism and print media experience and pull from that when we put this paper together. We have thoughtful meetings about it and really put a lot of effort in. But I also get praise for that from people, too.
Amanda: It probably depends on the vendor. Folks who have been around a long time know me pretty well. I don’t think much would surprise them about me at this point, but I think newer vendors would probably be surprised to see me in person. They often only know me by name, which is something that I could probably work on at this juncture, but I’m just not as often in person there as I have been in the past.
I think too, when I talk with vendors, most of them tend to be surprised when folks have a background that looks like theirs. And so, it’s been great for relationship building over the years to just be like, “I’ve been there” or, “My parent was also incarcerated” or, “I’ve been behind on my rent by several months before.” And maybe it’s not totally surprising to them as much as I think, maybe it’s just a reminder that they’re not alone in all of this.
And going back to readers, I think they would be super surprised to know just how tight knit we are with our vendors to the point that it is a real community. It’s a genuine connection at The Contributor. Nobody expects you to be friends with anyone. But when you spend time with people over a number of years and you see them through struggles, and they see you through struggles, you build those relationships that are necessary to keep going with it from our perspective and from theirs, because I won’t lie that working in homelessness for a number of years can be difficult, too.
In terms of the paper being a testament to community, I think anybody can drop in, drop out, come back. We’ve had vendors like Anita who have needed us and then not needed us and found other ways to build community and then come back to us. Seeing her come back and be enveloped again is a good reminder of how important it is that we stay around as a paper.