The Long Telegram

Like Rome, Except Buried

Three barns dotted the so subtle hill
between the house and pasture.

Those lineal shacks, so thoroughly
scattered over time and place,
they had a long stay.

On one long day, we buried the barns.
We flung their fibrous ribs and legs,
their innards: a deco flower in oils,
some signage said Cockright
for County Commissioner, and grandpa’s

old wood and only pitchfork
into sowed and drawn down clay
red and burgeoning at its edge.

I never crossed out
beyond those carved furrows
before we tilled them under.

I was never comfortable with the term citizen journalism for two reasons: personal vanity and mortal occupational fear. First off, I like to think that what I do for a living is difficult and specialized. Following from that, if anyone can do it, there’s no reason why I should get paid to do what I do. But I’ve had experiences recently that shattered those last bulwarks of self-aggrandizement.

Journalism, as an institution, often fails to capture the full range of emotion and nuance in stories it does take on. Because of time constraints, bureaucratic inertia or our desire to present a concise narrative to readers, we boil things down, simplify them, distill them. Worse than that, on occasion we ignore them. The only way to combat this is by increasing the number of storytellers. Far from obviating the need for journalists, this only increases the wave of information journalists can ride, if they’re skillful.

Amid the very justified news-o-sphere clamor over an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, a new Supreme Court nominee, a bomb in Times Square and a British election, the story of flooding in Nashville fell through the cracks. For the first time I’ve seen, photographers in Nashville took up their cameras and created attention-grabbing pieces that rival anything a news network could have done. The best of these came from Michael Deppisch.

Michael Deppisch - The Nashville Flood. May 2, 2010.

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I’m very happy to say that I’ve been invited to go to Iraq this summer and teach video journalism with a team from The Tiziano Project.

We will head to Erbil, Iraq, the capital of the Kurdish region in the north, in early June for an 8-week workshop. The students will include both young, aspiring journalists and experienced professionals who want to develop their video skills.

The Tiziano Project’s mission to educate and empower those living in conflict zones to tell their own stories is something I support wholeheartedly. Andrew McGregor founded the project three years ago with the hope that violence in under-reported conflict areas might never go unnoticed in a world where YouTube allows people to tell their own stories. Since its inception, Tiziano teams have worked in Iraq, South Africa, Somalia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and elsewhere.

I’m double-plus excited to share what I know in my role as a video mentor this summer. This blog will tell part of that story (from my vantage point), but there will be content from our students as well. Our three-person team, including myself, Jon Vidar and fellow Medill alum Victoria Fine, might even find the time to make a few videos of our own while we’re there. Stay tuned for more details as the story unfolds…

This video combines the fascinations of 5-year-old me (fast and big things) and 25-year-old me (Russian things) perfectly.