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Saturday, August 12, 2006
The story of a story 
| | On Wednesday I wrote a post saying that Doc Searls is Journalism because he took a picture of a moment in time and published it. It was a monmet that no one else captured, no big media was there. By saying that Doc Searls is Journalism, I was saying that all of us are reporters. If we all capture moments in text, audio and video, and publish them for others to share, we'll get a fuller picture of things that are happening. |
| | Doc Searls did it again yesterday... |
| | And Steve points to my on-the-scene coverage of what went down at Logan Airport in Boston when odd new security measures (no fluids other than bodily ones were allowed past the security checkpoints, or onto planes) went into effect, following terrorist arrests in London. Which almost nobody knew about, yet, there in Boston. |
| | As of today, Technorati finds 32 posts with both "searls" and "logan". Google Blogsearch finds 30. |
| | In many of these I am credited with breaking the story. Just to be clear, that might be true if the story we're talking about is about the experience of travelers in the U.S. first encountering the new security measures. But the story behind those security measures was hours old by the time I showed up at Logan just after 4am Eastern time. |
| | Metropolitan police announce that a "major terrorist plot" to allegedly blow up an undisclosed number of aircraft has been "disrupted". |
| | The arrests are part of a "pre-planned intelligence operation" lasting several months by the anti-terrorist branch and security services. |
| | John Reid and transport secretary Douglas Alexander broadcast a short message repeating that message. |
| | Online, the threat level on MI5's is raised to "critical". "This means that an attack is expected imminently and indicates an extremely high level of threat to the UK." |
| | This was at 12:35am Eastern time, nearly four hours before I showed up at Logan. It wasn't until I was standing near the front of the halted line at the security checkpoint, blogging about the experience of just standing there, that I found out from the BBC (via a Google News search) that Heathrow had been closed. That's when I began to gather what was causing the backup. |
| | As you might guess, security lines aren't easy places to operate a laptop. Mostly I balanced mine on top of one of those queue-control posts connected by retractible belts. This was okay for viewing (it was stable if I steadied it there with two hands), but not so good for typing. So, some of the time, I just put the laptop down on the floor and got on my knees to type on it there. The TSA guys, who were out in force, didn't notice or care. Mostly they took turns yelling at the crowd, saying over and over that fluids and pastes were no longer allowable carry-ons. |
| | My regret, once I got past security and learned from live television what was actually going on in London, was that I missed a great once-in-a-flytime photo opportunity. Back at the ticket counter I'd watched dozens of people, mostly women, down on all fours, removing bottles and tubes of moisturizer, cosmetics, sun block, hair spray and pharmaceuticals from carry-on bags, and transferring them to already overstuffed luggage. It was a perfect picture. Why the hell didn't I shoot it? |
| | Because at the time I mostly thought the whole thing was a hassle, and worried with the rest of the crowd about possibly missing flights or connections. |
| | So, on the flight to L.A. I planned to shoot pictures of whatever looked interesting once I got there. But there were only the usual crowds. My moment was lost. Which, in the larger scheme, hardly mattered. |
| | For what it's worth, I didn't think of myself as a reporter on the scene, even though, in a literal sense, I was. I thought of myself as a traveler blogging about being where news of some sort was going down, maybe. That's not journalism as I've been taught to think about it over the last 40 years I've been doing it. But in a literal sense it was journalism. I was, after all, writing in a journal. |
| | So I think the real story here is a slo-mo one that will go on for years. It's the story of how journalism became a ordinary practice, rather than an exclusively professional one. |
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