 |
 |
 |
|
Loss I'm writing this while sitting in Delta's Crowne Club at LAX, just before flying to New York. My plane leaves in half an hour. Last night I watched the 10 O'Clock news on Fox 11 TV here in L.A. Much of the news was devoted to the Gulfstream jet that crashed in Aspen, killing all 18 aboard. Two of the passengers were members of the Fox 11 news team. It was an awful story. Both were young and loved by their co-workers. He worked the assignment desk and she worked in research. Their romance was someting of a secret. This was their first travel date: spring skiing in Aspen. They died 500 feet short of the runway. What moved me in a sideways direction was how emotionally contained the anchor people forced themselves to be. They were so stiff and strangely formal. What was it like for them shooting and airing footage of these weeping loved ones, the family members destroyed by grief? How strange is it, doing "if it bleeds it leads" journalism when the leading bleeders are people you love? I'm not sure what to make of this, except to note how honestly different it is to write a personal journal, which is what Deborah Branscum did in her blog last week when she wrote about the death of her friend Leslie Barton. Blogs are journalism in its most literal sense. They are also journalism with a reset button. I can change what I write, as I did the other day when I put up a story a friend sent to me with the expectation it would remain private. After I yanked it, I realized that my words aren't "for the record" in the customary sense, which depends on the permanant qualities of dried ink distribted in quantity by a publisher. But my "medium" isn't just pixels. In fact, I suggest that it's not a "medium" at all. It's speech. I write — speak — to feed conversations. I express some of what I know so it might become part of what we know, and changed and enlarged in the process. If we find that some of it is just packing material, fine. At least we don't come to that conclusion alone. On the road again We drive to L.A. today. Tomorrow I fly to NY for the Personalizatiion Summit. Back next Thursday. Meanwhile I probably won't get to blog again until Sunday. But stay tuned.
|
