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| Tuesday, February 28, 2006 |
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Independence and linkage 
Turning journalism inside out
| | The top still thinks it can "manage" its way to success by manipulating the bottom. This is exactly the opposite of what's required in the business disruption that's impacting the communications world. Why? Because the bottom is now in charge, and the laws of attraction "work" where laws of promotion don't. Before you try and "leverage" people (that's what this is really all about), you ought to ask if they want to be leveraged. They don't. |
| | As with everything Terry writes, I'm in substantial, perhaps even complete, agreement. |
| | The one thing that felt odd to me, in agreeing with Terry in that paragraph, was the top/bottom construction. If you haven't read Daniel Steinberg's Why No Pictures post quoted in the item below, please do that now. In that post, Daniel tells how a friend kept lying local news jackals at bay while Daniel and his family dealt, in privacy, with the death of their daughter — before Daniel reported his own story later, in his own way, and with far more dignity, depth and meaning that would ever survive the local TV filter, on his Dear Elena blog. |
| | Now I ask, who are the "top" and "bottom" characters in this story? |
| | Rivers or ink and mountains of pixels have been wasted on the question of whether blogs are real journals, or bloggers real journalists. |
| | Yet so much of what "real" journals and journalists do is harmful or morally awful, that I wonder if we shouldn't push a big reset button on the whole thing, and start grounding our definitions in journals, period. |
| | Most of those today would be blogs. |
| | Rather than anchor the definition of journalism in some top-down manner defined by professional pyramids of long standing, how about anchoring it in writers? Specifically, individual, independent writers. |
| | What makes Terry Heaton and Daniel Steinberg real journalists isn't who they work for. It's who they are, and that they write with honesty, humanity and insight. They move and increase us as human beings. Their relationship with the world, through their blogs, is from the inside to the outside: literally, inside out. They come from their guts and their brains and their hearts. |
| | That's the beginning of a new and better ism. |
| | Writing from one's organs isn't new. We've had it since Pepys, Franklin and others, centuries ago. What's changed is the environment, which is so supportive of independence that the old dependency-leveragers are simply made ridiculous. |
Dear Daniel
| | Thank you for Dear Elena, a blog that chokes me up for the worst and best reasons, which are both the same: because it's true. |
| | I wince and flush to read a paragraph like this one — |
| | How often have you been with your child and not been with them. You've taken the time to be at a kid¹s soccer game but been on your cell phone. You've left work to pick your kid up from school but your mind isn't there on your son or daughter and the day they've just had at school - your mind is already back at your desk on the next thing you have to do. |
| | — and to know my child is alive, and I'm not not always truly present with him. |
| | Last night we did something we rarely do: watch the evening news. There was a scheduled feature involving friends and colleagues from the University, and we wanted to know more about the heavy rains that battered the town all day. But the first story was about hideous abuse of her own children by a woman who runs a day care center. It wasn't sensationalized, but it was too interesting in too many wrong ways for a nine-year old, so we turned the tube off. The thought in my mind: A picture can subtract a thousand words. |
| | Our boy went back to reading. |
| | ...we're not posting pictures of Elena. |
| | Channel 19 came over twice trying to come into our house and shove a camera in Kim and my face. Patti has been guarding the door and watching over us. She kept them out. Kim and I don't watch local news - it's one tragedy after another overplayed in ways that don't serve the public. We certainly didn't want to be the subject of a story. The woman from the t.v. station said "he's already talked to channel 8." Patti wisely said, "no he hasn¹t and I still am not letting you in." |
| | They came back a second time while Kim and I were at the funeral home picking out a casket. Patti was playing board games with Maggie. Maggie had beaten her at Deflexion and Mancala and had moved to Sorry because "it's mainly a game of chance so maybe you can win." This time they told Patti they just wanted to come in and film Elena's picture. Again Patti sent them away. |
| | But it isn¹t because of privacy that we aren¹t posting her picture. It's hard to describe, but I'll try. |
| | I've read all of your comments. Thank you. Many of you have sent us support and that means a lot. But many of you have sent us a note about looking at your own child differently. Others have sent stories of losses you have suffered. A picture makes this story about one particular little girl. We¹re touched that you have personalized this story and made it about you and your family. |
| | Thank you, too. And your whole family. |
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