Blog

Getting by on Less

[col-sect][column]In backpacking, there are two camps: ultralight backpacking, and what I call "gear packing."

A true ultralight backpacker can get by living off a 12lb pack for 3-5 days. They sleep on the ground under a tarp, they eat super efficient (but not tasty) meals and they don't carry any extras. To the "Ultralight-ist," weight is what keeps you from being present in the wilderness. A heavy pack can get you hurt and it kills your endurance, limiting what you can accomplish. But God help you if things go south. In fact, most ultralight blogs have large sections devoted to survival.

On the same 5 day trip, a gear packer might be hauling 45lbs of tent, sleeping bag, pads, meals, first aid, games, and rope. This is the stuff of REI. If I'm honest, I've been in this category most of my life. Gear is fun and it does neat things. "GPS and batteries (and a solar kit) are so much more reliable than a topo map and a compass." But you don't go as far or as fast.

Right now, I would contend that solo journalists are in the second camp. A lot of new crap has come out. HDSLRs, awesome digital recorders-someday the Red Scarlet will actually exist–laptops, batteries, hard drives, cables and more cables. So, how do we get by on less? But not just us.[/column]

[column]It's the mantra of the journalism market right now. Can we get by on less staff? Can I get by with less clients? Can we get by with less ad revenue, less office space, a smaller distribution?

Even in the field, I'm constantly confronted with the need to scale down. Smaller budgets, less gear, less power access... in the journalism industry, the answer to can I get away with less? is probably going to be "yes" regardless of the question. Technology means we can shrink overheads, cut our gear footprint, even scale down staff. That's easy.

But we don't just mean "can I get by?" We mean "can I get by with most of my creature comforts and security."

The real question is, are you interested in the lifestyle attached to "less" and for most of us, the answer is much harder. Am I willing to scale down for the sake of speed and response? Can you sleep under a tarp for the sake of the story?
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The reason Journalism as we know it HAS to die.

[col-sect][column]This graph has been floating around in the twitter feeds for a couple of days now.  I saved it to my computer and I keep looking at it.



John Emerson designed this graph for a NY times piece a few weeks ago.  It does a fantastic job of showing the depravity of situations in Africa as well as the depravity of several editing desks in the western world.  Something is not right here.  I hope we all can see that.  I have seen a few, very good explanations for the problem that basically boil down placing the blame on false meta-narratives.  Themes like Christians vs Muslims and West vs East, which the Darfur conflict plays right into, and which the issues in Congo completely confuse.

One could almost argue that the public made Darfur into a religious coldwar theater the way Angola or the first Afgani war was for the democratic west and communism.  To distill it more, I think that with Darfur there was a clear moral devision in the begining: "Helpless minority peoples being chased down and killed systematically by the majority people group in control the state."  Western Journalism has a box for that, we have seen this story before.[/column]

[column]It might be said that Western Journalism (maybe western narrative to be more fair) doesn't have a box for the complexities of Congo.  The ten years of rippling war that has reverberated through the DRC and it's eastern neighbors does not allow the video journalist on a deadline to cut a nice concise picture in time for the 6pm news.  Writers given 10 inches and a deadline are left trying to empty a dumptruck full of sand with their hands.  But really, I think you could have said the same things about Kosovo: it's a really complicated place with 2000 plus years of baggage, but we found a way to make it really simple didn't we?  Not always accurate, but digestible for the West.

My suspicion (and fear) is that really, no one cares about Congo.  We have no reason to care.  More accurately, we have not been given a reason to care. Journalism has failed to cover one of the most bloody events of the last 50 years because it wasn't flashy enough, because they couldn't find a romantic enough angle.  To quote Anneke Van Woudenberg, Senior Researcher at Human Rights Watch:

"I fear that the Congo conflict receives less coverage because many outsiders have bought into the preconception that Congo is the ‘heart of darkness’...  ...as if the country is somehow predisposed to dark atrocities and violence, and hence there is nothing new to report.  Yet many have misunderstood the real message of Conrad's book. It is not Congolese barbarism but rather the greed of outsiders that have plagued this country's history."

It's not romantic when we are part of the problem.[/column][/col-sect]

Owned Narrative 2.0

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Erik Hersman, D.O.-Ushahidi.com, Afrigadgit.com

Erik manages an amazing organization called Ushahidi.

About a year ago I wrote a really stringy rant about my idea of “Owned Narrative”: That Journalist are better Journalists when they help connect the people on both sides of the conversation: The people who things are happening to, and the people wanting to know what’s happening.[/column]

[column]Your photostory, your essay, your 10 minute video that you just put together for some supermodel’s charity are great, wonderful and important things. With out them there would be people all over the world wondering if anyone cared about their pain and other people all over the world wondering if there was anyone/thing to care about.

If you have ever tried –sincerely– to tell someone else’s story, you know that the hardest thing in the world is to try to understand someone else’s world. To take that information, put it into your worldview to make sense of it and then pull it out in way that makes sense to an audience… with out it being covered in YOU.

This has been the plight of Journalists, Documentarians, Essayists, Ethnologist, and Anthropologists for years and years. Some have cared to worry more about it than others, but everyone has to deal with it on some level. It’s an important thing because we don’t want to misrepresent the stories that we report. On the other hand, there is NO WAY that a reporter can be expected to cover all the complexities of a story and it’s history with in the dead lines 99% of us have (and always will.)

This hurried interaction between a Journalist and his/her subject forces the storyteller to distill the facts and brush aside the subtleties of a situation. Resulting in one-sided narratives (Kosovo War), half-truths (Afghanistan War) or just bad stories.

Que Ushahidi:

Ushahidi does something amazing, it allows local people in, say, DR Congo to SMS (text) what is happening on the ground as Militias move, and war spreads. It then goes onto a live map that you can go to and see what is happening in Congo and where.

This tool in combination with things like Twitter, gives ANYONE the ability to be heard and communicated with easily… if only we knew where these people were online.

That’s the Journalists job now, to empower our subjects to tell their own stories to interact with our audiences, to Own their Narrative.[/column][/col-sect]

Third Wave Syndrome

[col-sect][column]I have this theory that I call "Third Wave Syndrome" I'm not sure it's really mine, but I don't know where I would have heard it all put together. here it goes:

First wave punk wasn't the Sex Pistols, it was guys most of us haven't heard of. The guys that are the closest to them are guys like Iggy and the Stooges. First wave punk didn't have defined esthetics, it didn't even really have a visual calling card. It was defined by an over arching ethos that informed everything else ( the unkept hair, untucked shirts, over driven amps, minimal instrumentation, simple melodies, etc) not the other way around. You could get up with an acoustic guitar in the mid 70s of Manchester and be punk.

Second Wave punk are the proteges of the first wave mostly. Sex Pistols, the Dead Kenedys etc. these are the guys that you have heard of. They get punk because the fathers of the idea are what they are watching and thinking about all the time. To Show that they get punk, they refine it. They see the most successful expressions of the idea, the ethos, and they zero in. Mind you, they know that you don't' have to were tight black jeans (second wave didn't really dress as bad as you think) or have tattered shirts, or deliberately not tune your guitar for months at a time. They did all of these things to really stretch and own the ethos that was handed down by first wave, this semi-nialistic, freedom from materialism sort of action.

Third wave does not have the connection to the source that second wave had. Third wave looks at Second and SEES the tight jeans, HEARS the laud, overdriven, simplistic music and defines Punk not as a mind set, a way of life, but as a list rules. They also romanticize it.

In the first two waves you could be punk as long as your trying to purposefully defy consumerism etc. even if, in your quest for punk you didn't always look and act like your peers.

By Third wave, it is a tribe and you are in or out based on your esthetics, not on your ethos. Third wave isn't from the same economic social background as first and second (blue collar industrial towns like manchester and liverpool), they are suburban kids that identifies with the esthetics an the emotions they carry, but aren't willing to take the hard ethical lines that first and second do. Third wave starts to splinter because of esthetic differences. Is it about the hair? Straightedge or nialistic Hedonism? They struggle with being cool, they want to be recognized, this never crossed the DK or Iggie's mind.[/column]

[column]What's really interesting about this is that you then have Post Punk as a reaction to the disillusionment with Third wave. These guys went to DK and Sex Pistols shows too and ended up at some very different conclusions entirely.

OK so here's the thing. Most great movements have these three waves, and they don't go anywhere past third until people start looking back to the root.

Christianity is a good example, the waves would be Christ, then the disciples and the apostles could be second wave. I would say that it really became third wave when it became a sanctioned religion of Rome. Rome liked a lot of things about christianity, but had a problem with some of the more revolutionary statements of Christ like the problems of wealth and morality, mans obligation to God before nation, etc and so you see a dramatic shift in the church away from Christ as revolutionary to Christ the Moralist.

Same thing with Buddhism: Siddhattha Gotama meets his subjects for the first time and reacts so strongly that he renounces his worldly life and through a long period of meditation and humbling himself arrives at the teachings that we now have. He teaches them to his disciples. "If you see the Buddha, Kill the Buddha because he is not the real Buddha." His deciples teach it to the masses, the masses make it a religion and loose the point of much of what the Buddha tough in the process.

All this to say, I see this in Journalism. The spirit of reportage can't be defined by a series of categories and ethics. Judaism is not defined by the 10 Commandments, the 10 Commandments are informed by Hebrews perspective on Mans relationship to God etc.

So the real question is WHAT is the heart of Journalism. That's the very interesting part to me. Because really, I think that "A Clean, well Lighted Place" by Hemingway is just as informative to the human condition of post WWI vets in Spain as any sterilized report of PTSD.

So, now what?[/column][/col-sect]