BARBS

Here are a few things I am wondering about after the news events of this week:

1. If (when?) most (all?) journalists are soon to be come independent “backpack” practitioners — you’ve got all the tools, you’re on your own, good luck! — who will rescue those who, either through youth, inexperience, stupidity, or sheer bad luck, find themselves under arrest and in big trouble? What if, say, they not only don’t work for an actual organization with actual resources and support systems; but also don’t happen to work for a guy who happens to know the former President of the United States? What then? Say what you will about (mostly) corporate-owned “old media” companies (I know I certainly do); they do have systems in place for preventing what happened to Euna Lee and Laura Ling, and when it does happen, they have a bunch of back channels for protecting their people and getting them home safely (yes, I know there are exceptions; see, e.g., Daniel Pearl).

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I wanted to point readers of this blog (all few of you) to some fun work posted this week by a couple of friends/colleagues.

Tara George, a journalism professor at SUNY Purchase whom I met earlier this year at a multimedia seminar at the Poynter Institute, made her video debut on the New York Times’s hyperlocal blog, The Local. Tara lives in New Jersey and has concluded that basements “are where the suburbs get really interesting… Down underground is where suburbanites go to express themselves.”

So Tara has posted the first of what she hopes will be a series of videos called “Show Me Your Basement” — her first subject (victim?) is her own husband, John Glenn.

As Tara writes on her own blog, “Who says a print reporter can’t learn new tricks!”

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