The Jersey City Independent "

Jersey City blogs and bloggers often come and go with little fanfare, but every once in a while, a blog emerges that is refreshingly original and, as such, worth noting. Jersey City Stringer is one of those.

The site, which is powered via Tumblr, was launched a few months ago by Lauren Wilcox, a magazine journalist who has called the Heights home since 2005. While the term “slice of life” is overused by editors looking for a human-interest story, Jersey City Stringer offers true slices of life, presenting snapshots of the city’s people and its human feel — and each item is accompanied by interesting original art. We recently caught up with Wilcox to learn more about the project.

Why start the blog? What was the inspiration?

The blog was the intersection of a few ongoing circumstances:

Having a hard time finding freelance work during the recession;

Staying at home so I could be with my son, but still missing my writing work;

Spending a lot of time poking around Jersey City to get out of the house with a new baby.

I realized that as far as raw material goes, I had more to write about with Jersey City than anything except maybe changing diapers, and I wouldn’t be much good writing about that.

About this time I read an article by Ben McGrath in the New Yorker in which he talked about a Washington Times sports reporter who had gotten laid off in December, just before the down-and-out Nationals acquired their hot prospect Stephen Strasburg. Convinced that the Nationals’ fortunes were about to turn, the ex-Times reporter decided to start a blog to cover them and raise money to go report from spring training. McGrath’s point was that it was the first time he had seen a blogger functioning as a beat reporter. I want to be a beat reporter for Jersey City. Except maybe a little off-beat.

Tell me more about the art side of the blog — the art has a very handmade feel; do you do those by hand, or using a computer?

A lot of times I think in images or scenes, and I have a few short graphic-novel-type stories that I’ve done with cut paper illustrations like these, so I thought I’d try that for the blog. I cut them out of a paint-coated paper called Color-aid (one of my favorite product names, after the metal polish Fabu-luster), glue-stick them into a notebook & scan them into the computer. Somehow in the Photoshop pipeline they get more polished and virtual looking but still handmade. I like the combination.

Is there any overarching theme to the blog, or is it just your goal to basically document, in your way, life in Jersey City?

I’ve worked at a couple of magazines and I like the idea of creating a magazine of sorts, in miniature, with regular features and departments that hang together with a particular mission, a particular perspective on a subject. I guess that perspective is just my perspective, the pieces of daily life I come across that add up to a view of life in our city as a whole. There’s something pretty unusual and complicated and still really energetic and impressive and cohesive about this town. I can’t explain it to you, but I can try to show you.

Like anyone, I’ve gotten invested in the place where I live. I get such pleasure out of reading the publications out of NYC that it’s easy for me to do a lot of existential hair-tearing wishing we had more of a presence there, so this is a way for me to pitch in for our side, try to put something out there that will add to the good work that other bloggers and media are doing on this side of the river. Mostly, though, it’s fun. I love talking to people around town — like Sultan the crossing guard or Jimmy the shoe-repair guy — because they are so into Jersey City, in their own ways. It’s our town.

It’s dorky to invoke Joseph Mitchell because he’s such a monolithic presence in nonfiction but I’ve been reading his essays about New York City and New Yorkers in the ’30s and ’40s, and they stand as this incredible document of, and tribute to, a specific time and place that would otherwise have gone completely unnoticed and then been lost. If I can do for Jersey City one-one-thousandth of what Joseph Mitchell did for New York City, I’ll be happy.

Future blog plans?

Expand and conquer. Top secret. Stay tuned.

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