jlinx: back in action

Just back from the Sun Valley Writer's Conference. More later.

In the meantime, came across this quote from Anna Quindlen on Today's Word on Journalism:
“Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description.”

A reader had written to Utah Journalism Prof Ted Pease, who runs the blog, asking what the quote meant. Pease threw the question out to his readers, who responded here.

Among the best:

It’s a diagnosis like schizophrenia or Swine Flu. If you’re a reporter, it’s just in your blood… --Amy

And:

Quindlen intended to say, I believe, that journalism is an affliction, and its practitioners are addicted to it. If so, I would disagree with her in one respect: Journalists are many, but not all are afflicted. Only the good ons are. -- Hugh

R.I.P. Frank McCourt

The New York Times reported last night that Frank McCourt, the Pullitzer Prize winning author of "Angela's Ashes", died of metastatic melanoma. He was 78.

Angela's Ashes, McCourt's memoir of growing up poor in Ireland, touched critics and readers everywhere:

“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."

A former NYC school teacher, first at Ralph R. McKee Vocational High School in Staten Island and then the selective Stuyvesant High School on East 15th St. in Manhattan, McCourt was a raconteur extraordinaire. While he never claimed to be a journalist, he was master of one of jouranlism's most important tools: the art of storytelling. An accompanying article in the Times recounts his methods for teaching his students to write, which involved a lot of storytelling of his own:

He was able to amuse his students and put them at ease, but he was also imparting a lesson. “Looking back, it was all part of a technique,” said Vernon Silver, Stuyvesant class of 1987 and a reporter for Bloomberg News in Rome whose book “The Lost Chalice” has just been published. “He wanted you to tell a story too. At the end of his stories, he would turn it on the class.”

A common exercise was asking students to describe what they had done when they got home the night before. “He would coax it out of us, showing us how to pay attention to mundane but telling details,” Mr. Silver said. “I remember a dialogue with a shy student. The kid said, ‘I did my homework.’ McCourt said: ‘No, no, no. What did you do when you walked in? You went through a door, didn’t you? Did you have anything in your hands? A book bag? You didn’t carry it with you all night, did you? Did you hang it on a hook? Did you throw it across the room and your mom yelled at you for it?’ ”

And on and on, until enough significant glimpses of the boy’s life emerged to begin to paint a picture....

We met him last summer at the Sun Valley Writers conference, first in a jammed breakout session, where he regaled the jam-packed group with tales of the classroom -- when he was most often addressed by "yo, teach" -- and of his disdain, by contrast, of academics and what he saw as their endless bluster on the philosophy of education. Clearly an inspiration to his students, many of whom who have had their own writing careers, he ended by telling us of walking through the Village one night when he ran into a former student.

"Mr McCourt," the former student said. "Remember me? I just wanted to say, thanks to you, I've become a poet."
"That's great, good for you," McCourt said, expecting a long tedious conversation about how he had inspired the kid way back when.
"No, no," the kid said. "I've been dead broke ever since. What I wanted to say was f*** you!"

Later, we ran into McCourt at the Haley airport. "Yo, teach," Tom called out. "Barbara here is a teacher, too." He walked over. "Yeah," I said. "But not the good kind. I teach college."

He shook his head. "College pro-fess-ors," he said with a smirk. "If I had it to do over again, I'd be a college teacher. Easiest job in the world...."

The conversation continued. What he said after that, you'll have to ask me.

photo credit: Hiroko Masuike for the New York Times

social media for the rest of us

Former capstoner Andrea Ragni forwarded this link to a listing on Mashable of the ten best social media tools for reporters and PR folks alike.

She writes: "As a PR professional, I find these resources to be helpful - at least the HARO one and it's incredibly reputable. I often wish I had such a resource when I was writing my capstone...but then again I'm sure I wouldn't have learned as much :)

"In any event, I think proposing the question about whether or not journalists have it "easy" now with such ways to tap vast masses of people would be good food for thought."

Good question. I do think in a way it IS easier for reporters to find sources, thanks to social media and other online tools. (And, of course, PR folks to find us.) On the other hand, there is also a caveat. As Alberto Manguel suggested at the Sun Valley Writers Conference, "A library that contains everything becomes a library that contains anything."

Ascertaining whether those sources we easily find are credible still requires, well, reporting.

But back to Andrea. Two years ago, she wrote her capstone on Second Life, which was not only new to me but to virtually (pun intentional) everyone else in the course. Each class she would regale us with the in-world tales of her avatar, who was hanging with everyone from a wannabe gangster to a Brit fashion designer. Couldn't help thinking about Andrea yesterday when I heard that an online affair in Second Life had led to a real-world divorce in the UK. bk

head spins

Dispatches from the Sun Valley Writers Conference: My head is still rocking from three and a half days of talks, panel discussions and break-out groups with folks like NYT reporter Timothy Egan, memoirist Frank Mc Court and Miami Herald columnist and novelist Carl Hiaasen, who by the way is the world’s funniest human being. McCourt is a close second.

More about ideas than process, much of this year's conference was oriented toward politics, current events and journalism, a lot of which will find its way into the classroom this year. A few quick hits: Former reporter Robert Caro, Pulitzer prize winning biographer of Robert Moses and LBJ, talked about his strats for understanding Johnson, lessons that could be applied to any form of journalism. He referenced his first editor at Newsday who told him the key to investigative reporting was documents: “turn every page, kid.” Which Caro did, literally millions of them, which was how he was able to follow the money that was the seat of LBJ’s rise to power. But he also talked about how he came to understand how Johnson was at once a ruthless politician and a champion of the underdog by literally moving to the high plains of Texas, where Johnson grew up.

Similarly, Timothy Egan -- his new book, The Worst Hard Time, is about the tragedy of the dust bowl in the 1930’s -- told how he found the story by searching for and listening (there's the key to all reporting) to the tales of the survivors, most of them women in their 80s and 90s.

NPR journalist John Hockenberry, the program director of the conference, moderated several panel discussions, among them a discussion between former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, New Yorker writer George Packer and ABC White House correspondent Martha Raddatz about everything from the dangers and difficulties in covering the Iraq war to the future of journalism. The sometimes heated debate was followed by a tribute film to the late David Halberstam.

I learned about the transformation of India (while 4 out of 10 of the richest people in the world are Indian, 260 million people in India live on the equivalent of .30/day) from diplomat Shashi Tharoor; changing attitudes in Europe on tolerance, multi-culturalism and Islam from literary journalist Ian Buruma, whose latest book, “Murder in Amsterdam” is on the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh; and the centuries-old culture of the Japanese imperial family from John Burnham Schwartz. His new novel, “The Commoner,” based loosely on the life of the current empress of Japan, imagines the life of the first woman outside the aristocracy to marry into the imperial family, which has been separated and cloistered from mainstream Japanese society by hundreds and hundreds of years of spiritual and cultural tradition. “As a novelist," he says, “you are always trying to enter the silences.” Ditto, journalism.

The conference closed with Argentinian writer Alberto Manguel, who spoke reverentially of books and libraries as the repositories of our collective memory. On the migration of books and information from brick and mortar to cyberspace, he ended with this reflection: “A library that contains everything becomes a library that contains anything.”

So much more. I could go on. And will. Just ask.

Meanwhile, the Democratic convention: Substance or sizzle – or a little bit of both? I understand the blog tent features beer, burritos, couches – and CNN on flat screen TVs. Interesting, yeah?

Finally, speaking of dispatches: Let me know what’s going on in your part of the country, and I will post your dispatches (especially if you happen to be in or around Denver this week) and/or photos.

Alrighty. I’ve just broken a bunch of blogging rules: too long, too many ideas, no pix, and too many linx. I'll learn. bk