Fantasy

For me the main types of fantasy are: (1) baseball, (2) romantic, (3) sexual, (4) terror.

This time of year it is baseball that dominates my own fantasy world. I have a team in an online league, and though we are not doing well at the moment, I pay close attention every day to my lineup in the hope we will be improving soon. I also have a son playing little league baseball, a favorite MLB team, and a softball team. I fantasize about all of these teams winning a championship, although the odds seem long in all four cases this year.

Romantic fantasies for me involve falling deeply in love, something I have done a number of times in my life. Each story has its own narrative. My current love affair is ending very, very sadly, (which makes three in a row!) and I'm wondering whether maybe I may be approaching romance in the wrong way at this point in my life. But something about this particular romantic relationship sticks with me in a brand new way, leaving me wondering whether its final chapter has yet to be written. So there may be a ray of hope.

Sexual fantasies are so charged for all of us that I doubt anyone who has ever played around with words and stories, in print, online, over the phone, or just in the privacy of their own minds wouldn't agree that the chemistry between what human beings do with each other physically has a power that is so scary and so exciting that it is hardly surprising that we've managed to overpopulate the planet as a result.

As for the final category, terror, this is where we all imagine the worst. It makes me so sad to contemplate that we all may fall victim to imagining the worst, and therefore never achieve our best. But that is the America I live in, circa 2006.

Metaphor

Years ago I was speaking to a group of journalists in Southeast Asia who explained to me that they often wrote about problems in a neighboring country because their government would persecute them if they told the truth about what was happening closer to home.

Journalists, like novelists, often use metaphor.

Tonight, I am considering two topics as metaphor: technology and Mississippi. Technology is driving more changes in our world, at a faster pace, than anyone could have anticipated even 15 years ago. Mississippi is a disaster zone, a place drawing would-be do-gooders, perhaps the most compelling story of our time.

Both are excuses to do what you want to do. Metaphors for things like fantasies and escape. Venues where whatever you want to imagine might come true, and problems you'd rather not face need not be dealt with. Both are rich with romantic intrigue. Dreams of riches and dreams of freedom, excitement, and adventure.

Much like the American dream itself.

The problem with both is they rely on escape from someone or something. There is always something left behind, like a set of values, or even worse, someone, like a person who loves you. So the fantasy cannot be attained without pain, and being unwilling to face that pain honestly is the likely option for those who choose to pursue these options.

The fate of those left behind is even worse. But metaphor simply does not ever reach quite that far into our language. So there is nothing left for me to say about that, except that it can be expressed only quietly with tears.

The Crowd and Journalism

The Internet presents journalism with so many challenges that it's hard to isolate any one of them as primary. But it may be ultimately that the power described in "The Wisdom of Crowds" (James Surowiecki's excellent book) will overwhelm what editors do and render us irrelevant. In that outcome, we will have been disintermediated. Google News already harnesses the crowd to surface news stories without human editors being involved at all. Algorithyms, not editors determine placement.

What is it that is vital that editors do? I'm not sure that our journalism community has been able to successfully articulate an answer to that question, but we better prepare one, because the crowds are coming.

One country, many parts

Growing up in Michigan, I felt we must be in the center of the world. Later, when I couldn't find a job in journalism after college, I realized that the center of my world was rather hostile to an anti-war, civil rights activist like me who also wanted to be a crusading journalist. So I migrated out to the edge of the continent, San Francisco. Here, there were many people like me, as far as politics were concerned. But there was still the matter of living life and finding one's way in a new world. Thirty-five years later, I have to conclude that you can take the boy out of Michigan but you can't really take the Michigan out of the boy. I believe my friends and partners would agree that, while I've tried, I'm still a midwesterner at heart, and this is a very hard place for me to thrive. Here, relationships are temporary in nature. You are supposed to understand that nothing is forever. Nothing you do really matters, because it all can be swept away in an instant, by nature or by a twist of fate.

Time

All my adult life, infact even as a child, I've been obsessed with the strange uneven nature of time. How it goes slowly, speeds up, stops, races away. Supposedly it is a constant in our world, but my experience of time is it contains the ultimate variability. From afar, in space, looking down, what can explain two days not that far apart in "time" when two people can have such different conversations. Day One: "I'm free for a while, do you want to get together." Answer: "yes, of course." Day Two, a bit later, according to the calendar. Same question. Answer: "no." The "of course" this time is implied.

Fact inside Fiction

Over the past few years, I've been teaching memoir writing both at Stanford and at the downtown campus of San Francisco State. In the course of that work, I've been confronted by the confusing nature of memory -- how arbitrary and subjective it can be. What is particularly striking is how different two people's memories of a shared experience can be.

For my Stanford course, we considered the relationship between memoir and journalism. In reporting, of course, we frequently interview sources and ask them to tell us what they remember about events, people, experiences. We write down their words, and quote them like gospel. Of course, we do our best to verify quotes by cross-checking with other sources and documents, but we rarely have the luxury to speculate whether our sources have accurate memories, even assuming they are trying to be truthful in the first place.

Memoir is even trickier. Here, we have only our own memory to work with. We may have journals, letters, photos, news clippings, and other contemporaneous historical material to rely on. But in most cases, when trying to recreate an event from the past, we have to somehow transport ourselves back in time, to recreate the honest emotional state of that moment if we are to have any hope to conveying what it was like to be there then.

As I've taught others how to access their memories and write their memoirs, I've increasingly found myself dogged by my own lifetime of memories. I find myself queestioning my own history -- or rather the history I've told myself up until now. Am I who I thought I was? How much is a life simply the sum of one's experiences? How is it that a sudden change, a loss, a trauma can shake up our memory stream so that it overruns its banks, and floods us with an overwhelming sense of no longer knowing what it is we thought we knew so well about ourselves?

Who exactly do we become then? How do we recover a past, the lines to which have somehow been broken? Does an entirely new story now have to be constructed?

To one who has entered this state of intellectual and emotional amnesia, there is a recurring fear: Will our past ever come home again ?

What Makes Journalism Matter?

The first story I published as a journalist was in my college newspaper, The Michigan Daily, when I was 19 years old. Since then I've written hundreds of stories for dozens of magazines and newspapers; three books, and several screenplays. I've also taught journalism from time to time at Stanford, U-C, Berkeley, and San Francisco State.

Young reporters often have asked me what are the values and components of great journalism. Following is a list I've compiled over the years of some of these factors:

Story Characteristics
Originality
Accuracy
Timeliness
Fairness
Relevance
Authoritativeness
Methodology Elements
Advancing the story
Maintaining confidentiality of sources
Transparency (identify sources and methodology)
Independence
Viewing events as part of processes or patterns
Penetrating secrecy
Objectives
Keeping power accountable
Employing compassion, empathy
Giving a voice to the voiceless
Understanding all sides – broadening debates
Foster critical thinking
Minimizing harm
Propose solutions / followup when appropriate

It's increasingly difficult, under the working conditions in today's media, to hold to these high standards. Yet, that has to be our mission, if journalism itself is to survive in a form we can be proud of.

Hope Or Hopelessness

Following is an excerpt, somewhat rewritten, from a farewell column I wrote last year when I left Stanford. I'll refer to other aspects of what concerned me then in the future here. But the essence, for today, has to do with what journalists (and everyone else) can do to sustain some sense of hope in the midst of massive change and alienation surrounding us.

Our society is plagued by alienation, disorientation, and isolation. It is a world of vast material wealth for the few but disrupted families and communities for the many, and an even vaster spiritual deprivation for all. It also is a world where it is often hard as individuals to find our way to form the lasting bonds based on shared values that we so deeply need, as well as any kind of lasting sense of collective commitment to the hard work that needs to be done on many fronts to make things better for all those who share this troubled planet with us.

I've known these things for many years, but in recent times I've often seemed to forget how important locating and nurturing a sense of hope really is for who I am and what I do in the world.

I don't mean to sound naïve here. It's not that finding hope in and of itself is an easy thing to do, particularly when we are dealing with the real difficulties life hands us. If there is a clue to be offered in this regard, however, it is that finding ways to really connect with others that eventually makes the difference.

We journalists pride ourselves on our interviewing skills, our ability to ask the right questions. Sometimes we need to remember to do that in our peronal lives, as well.

For me, personally, this is a challenging time, when I have largely lost my own sense of optimism about the future. I'm mourning some serious losses ion my personal life, and finding it difficult to get back to the person I once was -- hopeful, idealistic, committed. For right now, it is simply a day-to-day struggle. I hope better days lie ahead for all of us.