Running for Your Life: Who, What, Where and WiFi

If I were to teach a course today in journalism this is what I would call it. There was a time when a version of this phrase – in its pre-Internet form – said it all when it came to news. It amounted to rank order topics of interest: The Who, What, Where, and Whys of my day – the 1970s – actually constituted a primer for how to be an informed and responsible citizen.

The “Why” kicker always coming back to the core. Why do we care about the topic? Hopefully that answer reflected on what you intend to expose to make the world around you a better place. To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Who, What, Where were the preamble; Why, the essence of the citizen constitution.

Now, though, in our ironically “connected” world, that pre-Internet “Why” has been replaced by WiFi. A story isn’t a story unless it has an extra life in social media. Reporters don’t have a platform to say anything unless they have a gazillion “followers.”

Take the New York Times Magazine makeover. Why do the editors choose to allow a comic-writer clown of a Russian American, Gary Shteyngart, to write his impressions after bingeing on Putin-era TV? Because he is getting to “Why?” No. Because he has a gazillion followers. And those followers will bring the new nyt magazine to the conversation: Hastag nyt. Relevance? Not in the noble tradition of Who, What, Where and Why but the ignoble one of Who, What, Where and WiFi.

When it comes to Who, What, Where and WiFi, journalists aggregate followers first and then the news. Actually report the news, bring a critical vision to public affairs? That’s not a journalism class; it’s a history class.

Next: Running for Your Life: Draft dodging in Canada, circa 2015

Running for Your Life: If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday

Consider this a regular feature, right here at Running for Your Life!

Today's If-the-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday quote:

“When it comes to smartphones, I prefer to be ignorant.”
                                                                              – Sam Beckett

Running for Your Life: Chasing Winter Blahs

The idea, of course, is to stay ahead of the game. Flu shot, fleece layers, wool cap, parka with Porsche price tag, long johns, lined wool socks, fur-lined waterproof snowboots. Oh, and this winter, something call Yaktrax, slip-on wire-mesh affairs that attach easily to the soles of your snowboots so that walking on ice is significantly less of a calamity than the alternative, that I swear to God are selling like hotcakes in Park Slope hardware stores.

Still, winter – this winter – can dim even the lightest bulb. This is the time to stoke your passion, to set aside time to do that. It helps, too, to see what winter looks like through other animals eyes http://bit.ly/1E6QiAs What passions? Obviously winter sports: cross-country skiing, ice skating, tobogganing. Kids get the snow. Get bundled up in all that clothing, grab a sled, and go to the toboggan hill in your neighborhood.

Or indoor stuff: Write poetry, short stories, essays – get back to that journal (see second-last post) or start a new one. Draw. Paint the drawing. I’m sitting here writing this note after having spent a day in bed with a cold and fever. As a marathoner, I can’t not be a big believer in mind over matter.

In no time I’m back to my passions: running (3.3 miles today [Feb. 17], albeit @ slow pace of 9:30)  and writing. Off to work at The Post. Back on the trap lines, and as a good friend says, looking to snare a mink.

Next: Running for Your Life: Who, What, Where and WiFi

Running for Your Life: "The Burglary" by Betty Medsger

There was a time and place, it seems so distant, like that house made of crystal in misty skies, what is now a setting in a video game or a visual logo of the next new capture-of-all-senses movie producer, when American citizens cared so much about what their country was doing in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, East Pakistan and Latin America that a small group of them took the grave risk of stealing government files to see if their worst fears were just that, or real. That the dissent they were engaged in had been hollowed out through the actions of a cynical web of paid informers who sold their integrity for some false nothing of what was in the national interest and what was not.

On March 8, 1971, a group of citizens in Philadelphia changed what had heretofore been known about how the secret police operated in America. Not Cuba, the Soviet Union under Stalin, Russia under Putin. But the US of A.

One brave reporter stood up and did the right thing. Betty Medsger of the Washington Post published the first newspaper account on these files, which were stolen from a small FBI office in Media, Pa., during the broadcast of the Fight of the Century, between Muhammad Ali and  Philly fave Joe Frazier. She then wrote the book.

These burglars were the Edward Snowdens of their day, urged on by a breathtaking display of social responsibility, revealing what  US government surveillance forces are doing to corrupt democracy and steal into our private lives by taking liberties that today include hacking into the technological carapaces, where we conduct the private affairs of our life, but in the days of the Media crime (you really must read Medsger’s “The Burglary” http://bit.ly/19tadhq) nothing was known of just how nefarious the FBI had become under its dictator boss J. Edgar Hoover. How wonderful it is to consider the grace and true civic power these burglar-heroes showed at a time of crisis, a moment that has near-vanished from history – and would have had it not been for the amazing work in this extraordinary document by this courageous reporter.

Next: Running for Your Life: Chasing Winter Blahs     

Running for Your Life: Why a Journal?

Spied on an office desk of a goss news site where I swear to God you have be under thirty to be on staff: A journal with the title 1970s STYLE LAPTOP.

I can remember why it was that I starting running on a regular basis, going on forty years now. But I don’t remember precisely why I started a journal. Outside of two creative writing workshops, I’ve never been schooled in the literary arts. In college, I didn’t as much as take a single English course, having majored in journalism and political science. If I were going to write it would be for a job. Since 1979, I’ve had nine full-time jobs. Except for a bizarre five-month foray into public relations, I’ve been newspapering, editing and writing.

In June 1983, I went out on the road, planning to be gone from home until the following June. That’s when I started scribbling. On a trip that would take me across the US on a Greyhound bus and airborne to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mexico and Cuba, before I hitched a right in a four-seater Cessna back north.

In Tasmania two lovely travel companions bought me a journal that they presented to me with some ceremony and with touching inscriptions. It was my first journal. Christmas 1983.

I’ve filled a sizable book shelf of journals in the past thirty-two years. Off and on for awhile, but since the nineties I’ve been writing regularly in a journal. Story ideas, impressions. Pretty much everything you read in this blog was first put down in longhand.

We do things for our mental health. When I haven’t written in my journal for a few days, I feel it. Like a bank of storm clouds. At times the writing is slow, at times just a few notes. But when it comes to getting to a place where I can create, to go beyond the workaday writing and editing of my newspaper life, I need to sit down with my 1970s STYLE LAPTOP. And write.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Burglary by Betty Medsger