{"id":10728,"date":"2013-08-21T08:46:06","date_gmt":"2013-08-21T12:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=10728"},"modified":"2013-08-21T09:53:16","modified_gmt":"2013-08-21T13:53:16","slug":"confessions-of-a-catankerous-but-hopefully-useful-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/08\/21\/confessions-of-a-catankerous-but-hopefully-useful-soul\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a catankerous (but hopefully useful) soul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"brianswimming_375\"<\/a>This essay first appeared in the Adirondack Almanack. \u00a0Join the conversation there by clicking here<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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So here\u2019s the sad truth about my life as a journalist working in the Adirondacks.\u00a0 I wake up pretty much every day here in Saranac Lake wanting you \u2013 scratch that, needing you \u2013 to do three contradictory things at once.\u00a0 First, I need you to care about what I do.\u00a0 Whether I\u2019m reporting on environmental issues, paddling down a river, or pulling together a year-long investigative series about America\u2019s vast prison complex, I need you to share my conviction that these things matter.\u00a0 In a world of Kardashians, infotainment and blink-and-you-missed it Twitter feeds, those of you who filter past this first step are already the rarest, purest gold.<\/p>\n

The second thing I need you to do is put up with the fact that it\u2019s part of my job to be kind of a jerk.\u00a0 Not always, and not unnecessarily, at least I hope.\u00a0 But kind of a lot of the time, it\u2019s important for me to be pretty unlikable.\u00a0 Ben Bradlee, the legendary editor at the Washington Post<\/em>, was asked once about the backlash he faced for his reporters\u2019 work on Watergate.\u00a0 He said that their job wasn\u2019t to be liked, but to scrap and dig and prod until they found the truth.\u00a0 I\u2019m not in Bradlee\u2019s league, obviously.\u00a0 I\u2019m a small town reporter in rural Upstate New York.<\/p>\n

But I still have to ask the uncomfortable questions.\u00a0 I lift the tails of the sacred cows.\u00a0 I do unsociable things like trying to get my neighbors to talk about whether or not a big prison-industrial complex in the Adirondacks is really what the Park was supposed to be about, and whether those correctional facilities really did for the Upstate economy what people hoped and expected them to do.\u00a0\u00a0 That kind of behavior doesn\u2019t get you invited to a lot of dinner parties, let me tell you.<\/p>\n

As if that weren\u2019t already enough to ask of people, it\u2019s also a growing part of my job to find new, different and creative ways to pass the hat.\u00a0 And yes, this is the third thing I need from you:\u00a0 dollars.\u00a0 Because the truth is the business of journalism is more or less broken.\u00a0 With newspapers going out of business and TV stations operating on shoe-string budgets, the traditional methods for supporting a cantankerous (but hopefully useful ) soul like myself just don\u2019t exist anymore.<\/p>\n

Which isn\u2019t a terrible thing.\u00a0 It never made a whole lot of sense to those of us in my line of work that reporters charged with speaking truth to power got their paychecks because McDonald\u2019s or Wal-Mart bought up big blocks of commercial time.\u00a0 It\u2019s a strange truth that the golden age of American journalism was bankrolled by used car ads, grocery store inserts and classifieds.\u00a0 Plenty of reporters \u2013 myself included \u2013 hated the fact that journalism was, at the end of the day, big business.<\/p>\n

For better or worse, the internet changed all that.\u00a0 The current age of \u201cnew media\u201d journalism might best be described as Creative Freefall.\u00a0 In theory, websites like this one, the Adirondack Almanack<\/em>, give new opportunity to more journalists, writers, and thinkers to share their views, swap good, accurate information, and speak fearless truths about our world.\u00a0 Also in theory, the web gives you \u2013 the reader, or God forbid, the \u201cconsumer\u201d \u2013 the opportunity to toss a few bucks into the kitty to support the kind of ethical storytelling and reporting, that you find meaningful.<\/p>\n

Honestly, I remain agnostic about whether this new \u201cjournalism ecology\u201d will work.\u00a0 Let me be clear:\u00a0 I dearly want it to work.\u00a0 I desperately want sites like the Almanack<\/em> to be sustainable.\u00a0 And I want risk-taking efforts like NCPR\u2019s Prison Time Media Project<\/a>, to find an audience, and then find enough worthy souls within that audience who are willing to chip in a few bucks to make this kind of reporting possible.\u00a0 If it does work, then this very quickly becomes a new golden age, a better golden age.\u00a0 You\u2019ll hear stories like you\u2019ve never heard before.\u00a0 Our democracy will be flooded with fact-poetry, reported song and heart-essays.\u00a0 There will be viral networks of truth and deep conversation that rival and maybe eclipse the corporate-driven engines of blather and spin and muddle.<\/p>\n

And that, damn it, is a dinner party that I really want to be invited to.\u00a0 I want to be part of that club.\u00a0 The cool thing, furthermore, is that these questions aren\u2019t abstractions.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to be in Manhattan or LA to be in at the ground floor of this beta-test of a new American conversation.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t a set of theories being quibbled over by academics (or PR firms) somewhere else.\u00a0 This is being live-tested right now, right here in the Adirondacks.<\/p>\n

Our small journalism collective known as North Country Public Radio has launched a trial balloon in the form of a Kickstarter campaign to help pay for our absurdly ambitious Prison Time project.\u00a0 Let me pause to say a few words about the project.\u00a0 A little over a year ago, I sat down with Martha Swan \u2013 head of John Brown Lives \u2013 over a bottle of wine and talked about the need for a more real, substantive conversation about North Country prisons.\u00a0 We blue-skied a lot of great ideas, both for journalism and other forms of public discussion.\u00a0 (JBL will go public with more of their program later in the year.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing.\u00a0 When I went to North Country Public Radio and proposed the idea, I kind of expected to be laughed out of the room.\u00a0 Because that\u2019s what happens in modern American journalism when you propose spending a year on a single, investigative project \u2013 especially a project as somber and tough as prisons.\u00a0 When you tell your editors that you want to spend time digging around in old archives, doing the kind of deep interviews and long-form writing that guys like IF Stone and Adam Hochschild pioneered?\u00a0 In the age of Twitter and blogs, that stuff just feels impossible.<\/p>\n

But NCPR, bless their courageous hearts, said yes.\u00a0 They even suggested that we go bigger, hiring Natasha Haverty, a reporter and researcher familiar with prison issues, to help realize the vision.\u00a0 Only there was a catch.\u00a0 (There\u2019s always a catch, right?)\u00a0 The deal was that Tasha and I would have to help with the fundraising, with the outreach, with the effort to build a new, grassroots pool of support for the series.\u00a0 In a way we would be doing two ambitious things at once, creating a powerful series of documentary-quality news stories, and pioneering a new, more grounded way of paying for this kind of story-telling.<\/p>\n

If this works \u2013\u00a0 if Prison Time attracts real grassroots support, while also expanding the dialogue about an important issue \u2013 my conviction is that this will very quickly become the new normal.\u00a0 Next you\u2019ll see a year-long deep-root series on ethical farming or on invasive species or on rural feminism or God knows what.\u00a0 But something cool.\u00a0 Something tangible and deep.\u00a0 But only if the trial balloon soars.\u00a0 Only if enough people (yes, like you) give it a little lift.\u00a0 I know that\u2019s asking a lot.\u00a0 I\u2019ve already asked you to give a damn about our old-fashioned style of journalism and that mostly cleared the room. Then I asked you to tolerate what by any definition are bad manners.<\/p>\n

Now?\u00a0 I want you to shell out $1 or $10 to keep the ecology going.\u00a0 And yes, I\u2019m warning you in advance that if this works, more people \u2013 maybe including the Almanack<\/em> itself \u2013 will be coming back to you asking you to do it again.\u00a0 So with all our cards on the table, here goes.\u00a0 Click and chip in<\/a>, or click away.\u00a0 I will be fascinated to see which direction people choose to take us.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This essay first appeared in the Adirondack Almanack. \u00a0Join the conversation there by clicking here. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10728"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10728"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10733,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10728\/revisions\/10733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}