Enough said.
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May 10th, 2012
May 9th, 2012 I posted about tulips last year.
Perhaps I’ll take a break.
From writing about Melville.
To share a few more tulips.
May 8th, 2012
Last night, after I wrote about a passage in Clark Lee’s “They Call it Pacific” that described what a bombing raid on Corregidor sounded like, I spent some time exploring the Web for a little bit more about Lee’s book (Once again, the book includes the account of Melville and Annalee Jacoby’s escape from the Philippines alongside fellow reporter Lee). Along the way, I found something I hadn’t yet stumbled across in my research. In July, 1943, NBC aired a 30-minute adaptation of Lee’s book on its “Words at War” broadcast. According to Dee of “The Digital Deli Too,” the “Words at War” series aired during World War II and featured dramatizations of then-current literature about the conflict. Its third episode featured Lee’s book. As it turns out, the dramatization revolves heavily around portions of Lee’s book involving Mel and Annalee. Though it still focus on those first uncertain months after Pearl Harbor, it draws on the three journalist as central characters, with a narrative arc that makes Mel’s death the story’s tragic denouement. It turns out the episode — along with other “Words at War” episodes — has been shared on the Internet Archive. I’ll share it here, as well. It’s a fascinating listen, not just because of how the dramatization brings Mel’s story to life, but also because of the chance to listen to seventy-year-old radio storytelling. Why not take a listen yourselves: [WARNING: As is the case of much media from this period, there are ethnic terms used repeatedly in this broadcast that many - myself included - would find offensive today. Proceed with caution.] Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. The file comes from the Internet Archive, where you can also stream or download other episodes of Words at War and other materials, not to mention many other audio programs, films, images, text and even old websites. May 7th, 2012
This is what war sounded like. This is what war sounds like. May 6th, 2012 It’s complicated … and that’s the point. Journalism doesn’t have all the answers, and we shouldn’t expect it to. We shouldn’t expect our stories to solve things for us. Journalists’ primary role is not to answer the challenges that face our society: it’s to bring light to those challenges, so that those with the proper tools to solve a given problem will know that the challenge exists. In a sense, we’re brokers, we’re middle-men, we’re matchmakers between problems and solutions. But those problems and solutions still have to get to know one another, find the right match. We can’t consummate their relationships, we can just help them find one another. A couple weeks ago, I pitched a story idea to a magazine whose content I admire. From my perspective, the idea was right up this prospective client’s alley. It fit their unique geographic focus and addressed a new angle to a controversy that’s beginning to show up in more and more states. In the interest of still pitching this story elsewhere, I’m not going to get into much detail about it. I’m writing because the outlet’s rejection of my pitch centered on the editor’s position that there were too many unknowns in the subject I wanted to discuss. I tried to stress that that’s the noteworthy aspect of the story: this is an unknown situation. It also happens to be one that involves multiple state governments and economies sailing into uncharted waters. They’re trying to develop a strategy for approaching the subject at hand (hint, it involves regulation of an increasingly popular energy resource extraction technique), but don’t seem to be able to because they don’t yet know how much this issue will impact them. My potential editor didn’t want the story because there are so many questions. Isn’t that the point of journalism? Isn’t part of our responsibility as journalists shining the light on inadequacies in official government? Are we only supposed to do so when we have tidy answers to present? Am I asking too many questions? Continue reading “Journalism of the Unknown Unknowns” May 5th, 2012
Fifteen thousand dollars is a lot of money to raise in a couple months. Twenty-five thousand in one month raises eyebrows even higher. Yet these were the targets I set for fundraising as I work to tell Melville Jacoby‘s story. First, I gave myself a month to raise $25,000 in what turned out to be an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign. Now I’m looking to raise three-fifths of that amount in more than twice as much time. So far, I’ve raised nearly $2,300 through WePay, plus another thousand or so in checks mailed directly to me. That’s encouraging, but it means I’m on pace to raise $8,700 by June 16, and that’s only if I consider those checks in the calculation. But why do I need so much more money than that? Continue reading “Why Do I Need So Much Money?” May 4th, 2012 It’s been far too long since I produced an Along for the Ride post. Chalk that up to one of my failings. Lately, though, I’ve been teaching multimedia journalism three days a week at Clark College, in Vancouver, Wash. Occasionally, as I did today, I take public transit there instead of driving (and I hope to bike some day). Today, I took some video and audio equipment along for the ride so I can show you a sliver of what it’s like to commute by transit across the mighty Columbia River. Enjoy. May 3rd, 2012
There’s something about this machine that changes my writing, that makes it into something else. There’s something about the way this machine and my fingers interact, about the immediacy and the physicality of words landing on the page that isn’t replicated on a computer screen. It doesn’t quite make sense to me that different tools can produce different types of writing — it’s all still made up of words, after all — but, nevertheless, they do seem to do so. By the way, this machine wouldn’t be in the condition it is had I not bought myself a birthday gift last year of a tune-up from Portland’s Ace Typewriter & Equipment Company, an anachronism in a town full of anachronisms. A while back, my friend Christina spent a day shadowing the father and son team as part of her research into a bigger project about second hand society (By the way, she wrote a great piece for the New Yorker about Portland’s last book scout). I got to read a version of that piece and know that Ace isn’t intentionally anachronistic the way so many throwback enterprises in Portland can be; instead, the father and son team running the store are just plugging away at their business as they have for decades. May 2nd, 2012 It’s easy for me to get excited about Melville Jacoby. He’s family. He was, like me, a journalist. He traveled all over the world, and made many interesting friends. The strong impressions Mel made weren’t limited to personal relations, though. After Mel died in 1942, Stanford University‘s journalism department produced a beautiful pamphlet memorializing his life. The booklet led off with reflections on Mel and the impact his reporting had in those early days of World War II. They came from two of the most prominent U.S. military officials of the time, General Douglas MacArthur and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. See what they had to say after the jump. Continue reading “Don’t Take My Word For It” |
      
Click below to help tell the true story of a young foreign correspondent's adventures amid the outset of a world war, recounted in a book and enhanced ebook.  |
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In recent weeks I’ve been re-reading Clark Lee’s “
Don’t have much time to blog today, but I wanted to share with you the device you could get letters written to you from