Bill Lascher 5/10/11 Bill Lascher 5/10/11

Blogathon haiku day: My watched pot of a career

Bill Lascher 4/27/11 Bill Lascher 4/27/11

Plutonium pride on the Mid-Columbia

Bill Lascher 4/13/11 Bill Lascher 4/13/11

Heart of the Monster: Journey to SEJ 2010, Part 3

I admit that the story – and this entire series, delayed as it may be – has meandered from its path. Nevertheless, I'm also wrestling with how to respond honestly to my experiences, with what happened in my brain on the journey and whether it's self-indulgent to serve this soup of thought (it's a little too stagnant to call it a stream) to you, instead of a straightforward report of the who and the what I saw where and when. Which approach provides the real, honest reporting?

Bill Lascher 3/22/11 Bill Lascher 3/22/11

Uncertainty, seismic risks and nuclear regulation

Bill Lascher 6/11/10 Bill Lascher 6/11/10

Following a War Correspondent's Footsteps to the Oil Spill

Will following the footsteps of Melville Jacoby, a World War II correspondent and my grandmother's cousin, help me cover the gulf oil spill?

As I learned from my grandmother about Melville, I realized he played a central role telling stories about one small part of another great, global crisis. Perhaps the war was more romantic than seemingly glacial environmental changes (though really, they aren't so glacial) but both crises are the defining milieus of a particular generation. "Like Melville," I wrote, "I want to chronicle my generation's response to its crisis."

Bill Lascher 5/18/10 Bill Lascher 5/18/10

Guest Post - All for one and one for all: why writer communities

Bill Lascher 5/7/10 Bill Lascher 5/7/10

The Free(lance)dom to Investigate

Bill Lascher 4/23/10 Bill Lascher 4/23/10

Telling the stories we aren't searching for

I agree that SEO isn’t about conforming to a robotic standard, but it’s also not about speaking to people, it’s about speaking to some sense of the mean average of what people are looking for. The thing is, if we want to succeed — both in reaching people and in drawing them back to our work — we can’t just be producing what the public is looking for, what the public wants to read. We must, we absolutely must tell the stories that the public doesn’t know it is looking for, that the public isn’t looking for, that the public hasn’t even conceptualized the terms for. If we don’t, in very short order we will tell fewer and fewer stories that matter, that impact society and we will lose not only all impact, but all value we are capable of offering the public.

Bill Lascher 4/1/10 Bill Lascher 4/1/10

All Things Not Considered in NPR's Oil Drilling Coverage

Bill Lascher 11/25/09 Bill Lascher 11/25/09

Making the most of making the media

For all the critiques I have of the W e Make the Media Conference at the University of Oregon's Turnbull Portland Center in November, 2009,and all the many more already so eloquently articulated by other thinkers (Click here for a list of the reflections I've found, some of which I'm responding to here), I'm stunned by how, a few days later, I remain invigorated by the event. Like Abraham Hyatt and many others, I left the event quite drained, but now feel energized. Though the event may not have gone in the direction organizers hoped, perhaps it was a success anyhow.