Hip Hop in Print: The Writer: Lang Whitaker (Slam, King, XXL)
Writer: Lang Whitaker
Website: The Links
Quote: ” I’ve written for so many different people and it’s come from meeting people who know somebody who knows somebody. It’s getting out there and networking. ”
If you’re a serious basketball fan you’ve undoubtedly come across some of Lang’s work with Slam Magazine. As a staff writer for Harris Publications he is consistently present as a writer for XXL, contributing editor and source for various angles for King Magazine, and online editor and key member of the Slam squad. After making the move from freelance to staff writer he had some good info for any up and coming journalists.
So to start give us some history of your career in the writing game?
I started writing about eight years for a weekly paper down in Atlanta where I lived. I went to the University of Georgia and I went to Georgia State and studied English. At the weekly paper they didn’t really have anybody doing hiphop at the time. I was in school with Outkast and Goodie Mob so I kinda grew up surrounded by the music. Right around the time I started writing Southerplayalistic came out, Goodie Mob had just come out, LaFace was getting pretty big and TLC was just coming out so it was good timing for them and it was also really good timing for me. All that stuff was getting huge when I started so I was able to get in right when they were getting popular. I did stuff for the paper there about three or four years, then I started doing some stuff for XXL. I did a feature for the Source and then I did some stuff for Slam. My fiancé was going to move New York like three or four years ago so I called Russ, the editor of Slam who I had been dealing with for a while, and told him I was thinking about moving up. He was like we have this open online editor job and you can have it if you want it. That was like four years ago so I’ve been here since the summer of 2000.
You didn’t mention you write for King so I wanted to throw that in because that mag is the shit. How can I get down with King?
Datwon, the editor, used to be on the staff of XXL before I was there so when they started King he knew who I was and had read some of my stuff and I kinda knew who he was. The first thing we did was Mike Epps from Next Friday. They were doing a thing with him and they needed someone to write it. They were doing the photo shoot across the street from the office so they asked if I would do it. So I went with Datwon and did the thing and when it got done we were just hanging out. There is the Proof section of the magazine where you taste drinks and do a review about the drinks. So Datwon and I sat there and had this bottle of Hennessey left over so we just sat there and kinda finished it off and talked. I told him I liked what he was doing and he made me a contributing editor. Honestly, I have been pretty busy with Slam and XXL stuff so a lot of issues I won’t even write anything for King. I just come up with the ideas and pass them on and if I can’t do it I say you guys run with this.
The ideas are what makes the magazine ill. That’s the key part.
A lot of that is Datwon. He is the biggest hustler I’ve ever met out of all of the editors of these magazines. He goes out almost every night and a lot of the people they get in there is just Datwon meeting people and working those relationships.
When we were putting together this Hiphop in Print series I started seeing in a lot of mags it’s a lot of the same writers. I noticed how a lot the same writers float between King, Slam, and XXL. But even in other mags I see a lot of the same cats. It seems like it’s a small pool of writers that writes for every magazine out here.
Now that I work for Harris [Publishing] and write for Slam, King, XXL I can’t write for competition but there are some freelancers that write for everybody. Once you get established and editors know they can trust you to turn your stuff in on time, have it the write length and be what they are looking for they are willing to trust you to do something else.
Do you think it also might be because editors may be unwilling to give new writers a chance?
With Slam we have meetings once a month to decide what goes in the next issue. There are five or six of us full time. We’re all in the story meeting and we have the ideas we want to do and then we have people like Scoop Jackson that write for us every issue so by the time that stuff is divvied up there’s not a lot left. If you have good ideas and you can write you’ll find somewhere to write.
Your work is heavy in basketball did you play in high school?
Yea I did. When I was in the eleventh grade, our team was ranked in USA Today’s top 25. All five guys who started on that team ended up getting division one scholarships. Our ball boy was Shareef Abdur-Rahim. He was little. He was like 5’9 but we all knew he was gonna be dope when he got older. I played two years of varsity in High School and then I went to Georgia. I thought about going somewhere smaller to play ball but I kinda knew I wasn’t gonna have a future in the NBA so I figured it would be better to focus on something else.
What do you think separates Slam magazine from all of the other sport magazines out here like Sports Illustrated?
One of the main things is our audience. The people who read Slam are between fourteen and thirty. This is our tenth year and I think we reflect the culture better than Sports Illustrated does, at least our readers culture. The guys who read Sports Illustrated are usually businessmen and they like golf or baseball but with Slam it’s just basketball. It’s easy for us because that’s all we love. I’m up every night till 2 or 3 watching the west coast games on League Pass and so is everybody else. We come in to work at ten or eleven tired as hell but we’re all like did you see that Memphis – L.A. game last night. So I think the people we are writing for are ourselves and who knows that market better than us.
Why do you think the urban youth is so passionate about basketball?
It’s easier to play basketball than baseball. Basketball is so easy, all you gotta do is get a hoop and throw it on a wall or a pole. With baseball, you gotta find room, people, and have a catcher’s mitt. Football is hard to play on the street. Basketball is just the easiest sport to play. All you need is one ball and you can play by yourself. Baseball and football you can’t play by yourself but with basketball you can shoot jump shots all night and get your shot right.
What makes it so complicated for many athletes to make it to the NBA and actually stay?
I think a lot of it is being able to do what the coaches want. Anybody in the NBA can score. When you get to a practice or a shoot around the twelfth guy on most NBA roster can hit nine out of ten shots anywhere on the court. What coaches want from most of these guys trying to crack the roster is rebounding, defense, or passing. That’s why a guy like Kevin Willis is still around. All he does is rebound and try to take up space. Guys like Michael Curry on the Raptors has been around forever and he never really scores. He knows how to do the other things. He knows how to be a leader, how to be on time and play defense. Guys like that are able to have long careers. Even so the average career in the NBA, five years, is the longest of any of the major sports.
Being that you write for hiphop mags and a basketball spot do you see any differences in the stories you write. Do you have to vary your styles and approaches?
To me every story is different. The main thing you’re trying to get across in any feature, at least the features I write, is who is this person, why are we using six pages to tell their story and what makes them interesting. Is it Dale Davis who made the All-Star for the first time after ten years? What has he been doing for the last ten years and why is he all of a sudden good enough? Or it could be the Dungeon Family. Who are all of these guys, where did they come from and why now are they worth listening too? I think all you’re doing is telling a story and if you’re a good writer you can get the story across and make it entertaining. I think the key to any story I write is to just be entertaining. I think the worst thing you can do is be boring.
