When the minute of silence came, I closed my eyes and bowed my head. My hands began to shake. And then I began to sob. I covered my face and held the noise inside so as not to disturb anyone around me. A woman that I had met just a few minutes before put her … read more Noon, January 20
Tag: journalism
Turning off Facebook
This morning I felt that my grasp of reality was slipping away. I had to do something. I identified a major source of my disorientation: Facebook. When you spend hours scrolling through your feed and reading comment threads, your thought process starts to work that way – unfocused, trivialized, random, contentious, fact-free. That’s not the brain I want … read more Turning off Facebook
The Facebook lie
Mark Zuckerberg says that, despite all the fake news it disseminated, Facebook didn’t influence the election. He even called that “a pretty crazy idea.” It would be easy for any media outlet, including Facebook, to claim that each voter is responsible for filtering information in order to make a responsible decision. That’s the essence of individual … read more The Facebook lie
Keeping watch
Time was that I could rattle off the election regulations for Georgia – the Republic of Georgia, that is. In 2000, 2001 and 2002, I was in Tbilisi for a month at a time, working with local journalists to help them cover elections. Part of training them about their role in a new democracy was to train … read more Keeping watch
Editing on deadline
[Oct. 26] I didn’t really sleep last night. Should have been a good night’s sleep, because I was dead tired from two days of driving back from Virginia and the emotional exhaustion from the intensity of that visit. But duty called. I was up half the night waiting for page proofs. What a feeling. It’s … read more Editing on deadline
Making room
I woke up to this post from my friend Lee Howard that smacked me in the face: You’ve all been so amazing and compassionate with the massacres at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Paris, and Belgium and places far afield. … Guess what, it’s generally crickets chirping when it comes to a gay massacre in this country. … read more Making room
The F Framework
Today I wrote the following paragraph – wait, have some caffeine before you read it to prevent from falling into a deep sleep. Activities for this project all fall under the standard indicators at the levels of element 1.3.5-8, and more specifically under 1.6.1-14, 2.4.2-5, and 2.4.2-8, of the F Framework Governing Justly and Democratically (GJD). … read more The F Framework
Four dead in Ohio
I was only 10 years old, but I remember seeing the newspaper front page with the story about the students being shot. The late 1960s were strange and difficult years to be a kid. Adults shouting at each other about the Vietnam War. My older sisters wearing “love beads” and going to “coffee houses,” which seemed to garner an … read more Four dead in Ohio
So many
I didn’t know them, but I can picture them. They would have been laughing and talking, at the end of the work day, as they rode the bus from work to home in Kabul. The mix of men and women means there was flirting, too. Most of them were young, under 30, and their careers … read more So many
Four steps of investigative journalism and other pursuits
In 2002, I was asked to give a workshop on investigative reporting for journalists in Laos. I was pretty surprised by this request. Laos was, and still is, a tightly controlled Communist country. And yet, having given up central management of the economy, the party leaders had recognized that its media needed to do a … read more Four steps of investigative journalism and other pursuits