Author: paladin1787

Adverserial journalism part 1: disclaimer

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DISCLAIMER:

If you’re a source and I want to interview you or someone else you work with, there’s almost no chance (0.00%) that the story I’m writing will be an adversarial one. I’ve done some work in this vein, but what I do today isn’t it. The nature of my recent freelance contracts isn’t to inflame the public’s sense of right and wrong. Believe me: if it becomes that, you’ll know it, because I’ll tell you, and I’ll ask you what you think about it.

I frequently discuss so-called “adversarial journalism” on my site simply because I have a high regard for it. I believe it has the potential to nudge democracy in the right direction. And because it’s worth discussing. What are blogs for if not discussing?

I felt compelled to make the above disclaimer because a source recently returned my call to say, more or less, that they weren’t going to talk to me. They had read some of my website and—the implication was—it didn’t sit well with them. (I wonder why they called me back at all.)

I happen to agree with one of their sentiments: they’re from such a cool organization that they don’t need my promotion. Maybe they thought the risk of my doing an incendiary story (again, in reality, 0.0%) was just too high. But it’s their loss. I wasn’t lying when I said I was going to focus on their innovation and that alone.

What’s the moral here? Quick-hit interviews do not investigative reporting make, and I *will not* write incendiary things unless I have solid basis for it.

Information anarchy as naiveté?

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Below I’ve copied an excerpt from an Esquire piece mostly about Deric Lostutter, the primary Anonymous member behind “hive justice” actions in Steubenville.

I may not agree with the columnist’s every sentiment. But he implies a good question: what steps need to be taken before whistleblower-type reporting—easier than ever these days—sees the light of day? What does wisdom actually mean in this space? Surely governments need secrets to function. But aside from the truly vile ones, most secrets ride the fence as to which might offend the public. So we, reporters and editors, have to make the call; we’re judges and juries now more than ever before.

I’ve been thinking about all this for a long time, more than most journalists, and I still feel under-qualified.

Since the convictions of the Steubenville football players, elite media outfits like The New Yorker have reviewed the story and criticized the bloggers and activists for getting things wrong. And the real problem with these new democratic voices, as Marshall McLuhan predicted, is a function of the medium that makes them available to us. Many of the WikiLeaks cables showed professional diplomats ignoring corruption in the countries where they were stationed, for example, something that should shock only children. The Snowden documents have revealed more troubling secrets about the NSA’s espionage programs and the fate of privacy in the networked world, but Snowden himself spouts the same immature anarchist clichés as Julian Assange, that the governments of the world must stop trying to keep secrets and maintain order and simply allow “maximal diversification of individual thought.” The technology democratizes information, and a little bit of technical sophistication gives you a power that no twenty-five-year-old could have dreamed of before. But technology doesn’t give you wisdom. The information-is-free idealists depend on maintaining a certain naivete about how the world really works, which seems to be a result of lives lived online — sitting at home on their sofas, detached from a tangible sense of real-world consequences, they blunder into our worlds with results we cannot anticipate. This will not stop. It is the world we live in today.

Smart commentary

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One of my favorite journalists—one I hope to meet some day—Mort Rosenblum. Photo thanks to the International Journalism Festival, whose chroniclers used a Creative Commons license.

I read Rosenblum’s book shortly after its release a few years back. What a great piece of wisdom. Wisdom: that’s what journalism (and by necessity, journalists!) needs these days. It’s gratifying, then, to learn that Mort has a keen interest in all the NSA reporting of late by Poitras-Greenwald. Or Greenwald-Poitras. Whatever.

Rather than preach to the choir (have you seen my contact page, called Blowing The Whistle?), after the break I’ll offer some of Rosenblum’s recent thoughts, posted without fanfare on the Facebook page of his educational organization.

I think Greenwald’s new outlet needs to hire Rosenblum. And then me.

Continue reading →

I don’t fear 30

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For years, I’ve sensed a weakness in how I remember my age. I have no memory “device” to help; I haven’t bothered to figure out the math to calculate it, on-the-fly, from my birth date depending on today’s date; and most importantly, it changes every year. The age I memorized last year is now wrong. I had this thought recently: “I could very easily add or subtract a year without even knowing it. I wonder if the age I tell people is right.” But I never cared to check.

For months this summer, when someone asked how old I was, I told them “28.” Because I was under the impression I was 28. Then last week, I saw that a web site thought I was 27. Uh oh, I thought. So into whatever age calculator Google brings up first, I punched my birth date. 27, it said. My nonchalance has made me a liar, though on a matter of little consequence.

I’ve stopped asking people—people who are obviously American, anyway—where they’re from, because their answer gives me little information. Some hippies live in Atlanta and some neocons live in Portland. I feel like it’s the same with age. By 25, you may have lived a lifetime. Others, through repetition and comfort, live 20 years in the span of 40.

Surely on my last birthday, people congratulated me on my correct age. Somewhere between then and now, I shifted forward a year. Wishful thinking, maybe? I don’t fear 30.