Godless Baboons and .PPT Presentations

I haven't had the cold or flu in about two years and I managed to catch one here in Ghana in the middle of July where the temperature rarely drops below 80 degrees or 90% humidity. Ugh.

Anyway, it's been another full week. The rest of the team showed up and the second half of the trip began, which entails public health field research. There are several teams studying things like infant mortality, elder health, micronutrient deficiencies, and oral history, among other projects.

I am on the "Research Dissemination" team, which entails going out every evening to different villages and presenting last year's findings to the community members. My teammates and I have worked for the past three months or so on the .ppt presentations as well as a leave-behind brochure that distills the main health messages from the research. It was a great exercise in really figuring out what matters most from the research and trying to communicate how the findings are relevant to the villagers. Most of the messages weren’t earth-shattering (wash your hands, water from boreholes is the cleanest, take your children to the clinic if you recognize these symptoms, etc) but reinforcing the education efforts already underway is an important part of preventative / public health.

I fast learned thought that no amount of flashy technology or good intentions replaces a motivated and passionate translator. Thankfully we have all of the above. Upon arrival, my teammates and I were told that we didn’t have a dedicated translator for our team and that the responsibility was going to be split between some people who already have quite a bit of other management responsibilities. I knew immediately that we needed to find someone else and thankfully I had met Daniel from the sex education presentation. He’s a community health nurse at one of the clinics where we did clinical hours a few weeks ago.

Daniel is the epitome of community health nursing and I’m lucky to have seen him in action. He’s passionate, knowledgeable and caring. He already does outreach clinics in many of the villages, so he knows the people and their questions. We’ve been asked some pretty tough questions (how should you do exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months if the mother dies in labor? Or is it safe to eat the vegetables in the market if they are known to be grown with fertilizers and pesticides?) and thankfully he’s right there to answer them in Twi (the local language) and translate them to us for our final report.

I’m hopefully going to borrow someone’s GoPro camera and film one of the evenings just to give everyone a sense of what I’m doing. It’s pretty good fun, lots of randomness and excitement and lots and lots of waiting around for some unknown person or reason. I quite enjoy it.

The other highlight from last week were the godless baboons in Mole (pronounced like the Mexican sauce), which is a big game reserve in the northern region of Ghana. It was created in the late 1950s after years of big game killing threatened to dramatically reduce their numbers. African sleeping sickness was rampant at that time, and people believed it was caused by the flies biting the animals and then biting people, so people went on a killing spree that decimated baboon, elephant, lion, and other large mammal species, according to our tour guide. The government created Mole as a reserve to save the animals and to provide a tourist attraction for the local economies. It’s a beautiful, rustic place with minimal amenities, which I’m into.

But the godless baboons, I am not into. These baboons have become so habituated to humans that they have no fear and will literally jump on your back to steal the bananas or mangos out of your hand. It’s one thing to have the small monkeys bare their teeth at me (which they did when I shooed one off the breakfast table) but it’s quite another to have a large baboon with big canine fangs jump on your back to steal a mango (which it did to a Danish girl who made the mistake of carrying the food between her room and the table). It was disconcerting during the “safari” orientation to be told that the baboons have learned to target women because we carry around food and only shriek when attacked instead of hitting or throwing stones at the baboons as the men do.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I armed myself with rocks and took it upon myself to chase the baboons away from all human-infested (sorry, inhabited) areas, yelling and waving my arms about their need to be a taught a lesson in feminism and manners. One of the other students commented that the baboons will probably talk for years about the feminine looking man with the crappy shot, but I don’t care. We pick our battles and that seemed appropriate for a weekend “safari.”

There’s plenty more to write and I suspect I’ll fill in gaps when I get back to a normal internet connections speed. As it is, I have a few things I need to upload back to the States to finish nursing classes, so I can’t spend too much time blogging. Know that I miss you and cheese very much. Look forward to seeing you soon.

Ghana advances to the All Africa Games and I teach 1000 high schoolers about sex

It's only been a little over a week but it feels like it could be a month with everything that we've done and seen. Since last writing, I spent another day at the hospital, shadowing a very inspiring doctor on the pediatric sickle cell ward, taught about 1000 high schools students about teenage pregnancy (and did I mention I hate public speaking and am horrible at it?), met the district chiefs and elders to explain our project, and then later gave my group's presentation to a small group (here that means about 60 people) in a village. We also went to the Ghana v. Nigeria under-23 football game that was to decide who went on to the All Africa Games. Ghana won, thankfully!

The hospital experience is worth writing about because Dr. Dominic was such an amazing human being let alone doctor. He is finishing his last few months of his house rotation, which I think is the equivalent to our doctors' residency. He works on the sickle cell ward, but has a variety of patients because of the overcrowding issue. He cared for patients with leukemia, G6PD deficiency, ortho/trauma injuries, severe malaria and sickle cell crises. There were between 2-3 patients per bed, which even though they know poses serious cross-infection risk, they do anyway because they don't turn away any patients. Where else would they go? KATH is the one of the only hospitals in the entire region, so turning away patients is not an option unlike in the US.

At one point Dominic was interviewing the mother of a very sick little girl through a translator because she was from the Cote d'Ivoire. He found out that she was fleeing the violence in her home country after her husband had been shot and killed. While waiting at a bus station in Kumasi (the city we are staying in) her baby fell very sick with severe malaria. Thankfully she somehow met a man who spoke both the native Ivorian and Ghanaian languages who took her to the hospital. The little girl was admitted and started on IV antibiotics, which saved her life. She was doing much better, though still quite sick, when we met her. Dominic had originally intended to discharge her home that day and have her come in a few days later for a follow-up appointment, but upon hearing that they were refugees with no where to go, he was going to keep them at the hospital. After a phone call to his chief resident (who wanted them discharged because of space considerations) and a conversation with the translator, they worked out a solution. The translator agreed to take the woman and her baby home with him for the weekend so they could recover further and he would bring them back next week for the appointment.

The depth of kindness displayed by both Dominic and the translator was deeply moving, in large part because we don't often see that in our culture between strangers. Here, it's part of the every day life. I think part of why I love coming here and learning about different African cultures is that there is so much good, so much kindness and generosity to be learned from, which is not often how Africa is portrayed in our media. All we see are refugees in the camps, starving children, and bloody machetes. It's reductionist and insulting once you've seen how much more is going on here. I could go on, but there's still the football match and teenage pregnancy talks...

Sunday morning was spent attending a boarding school church service followed by a sex education talk. My portion was about teenage pregnancy. I was sort of thrown into it at the last minute and thankfully my friend and trip member Adrienne was also giving a talk on STIs, so we tag-teamed the talk. We obviously had a translator who really did most of the speaking, but our presence lent both authority and the opportunity to talk in-depth about these topics in a way that the Ghanaian sex educators often can't because sex is uncomfortable to discuss. Sounds kinda like the US, eh?

I wasn't sure what Daniel, our translator and good friend, was saying given that I would say maybe two sentences and he would talk for about 2 minute after, but I figured he was elaborating and filling in my gaps. I decided to tell the students about a girl in my high school who got pregnant freshman year and dropped out. I talked about how difficult it had been for her, how she had to put off school and wasn't able to get a good job. Daniel took that story and ran with it, telling the students that it's a problem everywhere and that when it happens it's a challenge. Apparently the students were shocked (and a little happy) to learn that white people face the same problem in the US. I ended the talk by saying we all face the same problems of teenage pregnancy and STIs, but that if we used the ABCs (sex ed here focuses on Abstinence, Being faithful, wearing Condoms) and respected each other, we could lessen these problems.

The second talk was given by some other team members and they discussed the finer points of putting on a condom by demonstrating with a banana...I was proud of myself for not losing it and laughing out loud and was shocked the students didn't either. Apparently Daniel had told them though that we would get up and leave if they laughed! A little fear never hurt anyone I suppose...Overall it went really really well and the school administrator asked us to come back next year and give the talk again. I think having strangers come in to talk about it both lends credibility and allows for a more frank discussion.

This post is getting a big long, so I'll save the other stuff for later this week. Nothing really to report on the football match other than it was good fun and Ghana won! I love coming to matches here because they're so much livelier and entertaining, even when it's just the under-23 team and not the national team.

Apparently there's a misconception (probably founded by myself) that I don't get emails here. I do and quite enjoy hearing what's going on in the States, so please write. Hope your summers are lovely and relaxing.

Wherein I teach women how to breastfeed.

Internet is spotty at best, but is in Ghana! It’s been several days here and eventful. I was in a community clinic (think going to the doctor’s office, but in a rural Ghanaian village), shadowing the nurses for the first two days.

The first day was spent working with a Ghanaian nurse in the outpatient clinic where people from the surrounding towns and villages come to get medicine. For the most part, we saw lots of fevers (malaria) or abdominal pain (worms) and we prescribed antibiotics. (You’re wondering how he made the diagnosis: verbal symptoms and experience).

At one point the Ghanaian nurse and I were trying to figure out why a little old lady was peeing a lot, thirsty, with back pain and hypertension. It was cool because we were basically acting as doctors (some nurses have diagnostic and prescriptive powers over here, far out) and he took my input when I asked whether it could be the start of diabetes. We tested her blood sugar – normal - and decided that perhaps her kidneys were beginning to fail, but a good course of antibiotics never hurt anyone. Hopefully it was an infection that the antibiotics covered and she would not be back; if she returned within a few days the plan was to admit her for intravenous antibiotics.

The afternoon was spent administering the antibiotics, which are painful injections deep into the “buttocks” as it’s spelled here. It’s the rainy season and malaria is rampant, but I’m not sure how much so because we didn’t do blood tests. According to Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) protocols from the WHO, if a child has a high enough fever during the rainy season in a malarial endemic area, it’s diagnostic for malaria and should be treated with antibiotics even without a blood test confirmation. I don’t know if the same holds true for adults, but that seemed to be the operating assumption at the clinic. I wondered though what treating every fever with quinine does/would eventually do to the local malarial strain’s resistance to it, especially because it’s reserved for severe malaria. Food for thought..

The next day I taught a group of women about breastfeeding because, you know, I have so much experience with that. Ha. But it went really well. There's a bunch of literature from the WHO for health care providers and the Ghana health ministry about it, so I basically reinforced messages they’ve already heard: exclusively breastfeed for the first six months, proper positioning and signs/symptoms to come to the clinic for. There was lots of laughter, weighing of babies, vaccinations and “abroni” (Twi for “white person”) songs.

Today was my first day at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) and it was something I’ll never forget. We weren’t sure if students would be allowed to shadow nurses on the labor and delivery floor, but it came through today and lucky me, I was one of the first ones. It took lots of introductions and explaining who we were, what we were doing, and that we were here to learn, but we eventually had a wonderful tour of all the maternal wards followed by several hours watching births. I saw a spontaneous vaginal birth (ouch) and a c-section (double ouch) and was beyond impressed. The nurses and doctors asked me several times how it compared to the US and I honestly said that other than supplies and volume of patients, it was the same. Actually, the Ghanaian surgeon was much faster at the c-section and he seemed pleased when I told him as he left to do another in the next operating theater.

After a very full morning, we took a tour of the new hospital built two years ago. Again, beyond impressive. I wish I had been able to take photos, but patient privacy is more important than my crappy blog, so no photos. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll take some audio snippets interviewing the doctor and nurse I’m shadowing.

Starting Anew

Blogging into the future...

Ken Sands, the blogger guru at the Spokesman-Review, said it's harder to teach journalists to be bloggers than bloggers to be journalists. In other words, blogging is particularly suited to a certain type of journalism, one where the journalist is present in the narrative and offers his or her opinions and comments on the subject. Many non-editorial journalists are unfamiliar with the 1st person style of journalism because we are taught in J-schools across the country to be "objective, accurate and fair" in how we gather and present information. But what Journalism classes often don't discuss is how the information left out or how the ordering of information is a subtle, but still subjective way of influencing how readers understand information.

Readers are showing their acceptance of blogging as a new and legitimate development in journalism. Apparently, my fear that people will confuse journalism with blogging is unfounded, said Sands in a phone conversation with my journalism class. Readers know that blogging, at least the blogging done by actual reporters, is more like a sneak behind the Wizard's curtain not a directive from in front of it. It's a way to see and hear information not typically present in news stories, for example, comments on the actual reporting. Reporters can discuss how they tried to get this piece of information, or how this source said a bunch of thing illuminating the issue, but that couldn't fit in the actual printed news story because of space considerations.

Sands' best point was that its too early to tell what blogging's effect on mainstream journalism will be, but that doesn't mean that we should resist it. Instead, journalists need to embrace the potential of internet technology and take advantage of the opportunity to combine print, video and audio journalism in one place online. He's beyond worrying about the survival of print journalism because he doesn't see them as in competition, which is another good point. There's attributes of newspapers that blogs don't have, i.e. established credibility, paper that a reader can hold, and a process of production. Blogs have immediacy and subjectivity as their main defining features. The two, if taken together, could take us that much closer to accurately reflecting the human condition.

This I believe

I believe in having a journalist's mission. This is mine:

As a journalist, I will strive to give voice to people and perspectives not typically covered in mainstream journalism. As much as possible, I will try to do so using their words in their context.

As a journalist, writer and human, I will treat others with the respect, love, compassion and dignity I would like to be treated with. If I fail or am treated with less than this, I will apologize and admit my failing or will gently but firmly point out this poor treatment.

My personal and career mission statements are guided by these same principles: respect, love, justice, humility, kindness, compassion, generosity, consciousness and hope. I will accept nothing less from myself and therefore from my friends, co-workers, bosses and partners.

I don't believe in much, but if the values of respect, integrity, honesty and love were universalized, I think the world would be a much better place. We spend so much time debating society's laws and rules without questioning the ones we internally live by, if we do at all. I think its important to begin within before working on the external. This I believe.

Talking to two writers

I've had the privilege in the past three days to talk extensively with two of the best, working American writers: Kurt Eichenwald and Edward Hirsch. Hirsch is one of the most famous American poets living today, has written six books of poetry, and is currently the president of the Guggenheim foundation. Eichenwald has been an investigative reporter at the NYTimes for over 15 years, and is one of the leading business reporters in the nation. He regularly covers topics outside of business, and has written several books about journalism and business.

Eichenwald visited campus to accept a Payne award for his ethical decision making during the reporting of a story about the increase in teenage porn entrepreneurs. He also visited the news room and hung around, graciously sharing two hours of his time with us joker student journalists at the ODE. At one point, I was sitting in a room with just Eichenwald and one other staff member and Eichenwald recounted many war stories of over two decades in journalism. At one pause in the conversation, I mentioned how it's always helpful to listen to seasoned journalists relate their stories because journalism is all about experential learning. Eichenwald disagreed.

"If you notice, I've told you several stories from when I was in college," Eichenwald said.

Having more experience doesn't necessarily confer talent or ability, it just means you've been around longer, he said. It's about how you use your experience and what you learn from it. One of his main lessons he's learned over the years is to never stop asking, "how can I see this differently? what are the different angles?" In effect, he never stops asking questions. And he never stops looking for answers to those questions. Eichenwald said he follows his gut instinct and judgment, which in effect is what it means to be a journalist in society. Our job is to use our judgment to follow up on stories and pursue information with a dogged tenacity so that society will constantly be better-informed. It was inspiring how much Eichenwald actually believed in the importance of journalism in a time when so many people rag on the institution.

Of particular inspiration was his answer to my co-worker's question about how to infilitrate the giant fortress known as the UO administration: you're not thinking hard enough. There are people who have those answers, they just don't know it. It's your job to find them. You don't have to call the press secretary to talk to them. Find their office and go chat with them.

"Recognize people's humanity and treat them as such. They are not tools for you to use. Too many journalists view sources as a means. They will never get the story," he said.

Hirsch visited campus the same week to judge the undergraduate creative writing contest. I was selected as one of ten finalists for the poetry competition, but didn't win. All of the creative writing tutorial participants had the opportunity to meet with Hirsch and ask him questions about writing, the future of creative writing given the anti-intellectual culture rampent in the States, and what it means to be a creative writer. He was one of the most engaging, accessible visiting poets I've met this year, and he had a similar take on his vocation to Eichenwald: commit to your passion and never stop following up on the leads, talents and projects you begin. Years of experience will serve as a gardner, pruning away the branches that aren't as strong, and in doing so, will strengthen your abilities.

What I particularly liked about Hirsch's talk was his advice to dedicate time every day to writing, it's about making a commitment, a habit of writing every day. While I haven't been able to make that commitment, I've definitely been writing more than my entire life and actually like some of what's coming out.

Talking to these two men who've dedicated their lives to writing, albeit two different types, inspired me to keep with it. I think writing found me, but now I need to keep writing alive and healthy in my life. When I think of my future, writing, in some form, is always there. It was inspiring and refreshing to meet two people who have made the same choice and to see how that choice is playing out in their lives.

What is a Journalist?

A professional journalist working for a professional media source such as a newspaper, TV station, magazine or radio goes through an editing process in which several other pairs of eyes review the material, checking accuracy, fairness, coherence, and balance, something that bloggers do not have to go through. Bloggers can insert themselves and their opinion freely throughout their presentation of facts. In some ways, this is a positive development in journalism because its finally admitting that journalists are humans with opinions too, but its dangerous too because bloggers are good at presenting their opinions as facts, which is why scandals get blown out of proportion and people believe them even after they're proven false. But reading the correction isn't as juicy as reading the first-day's story or the most recent blog.

I was chatting with a photographer at the Emerald about the question of what is a journalist and to whom should the Shield Laws apply. He brought up a good point: just because something is in print doesn't necessarily make the publication journalism. Example: journals of news/opinion like our campus publications, The Commentator and The Insurgent. The Insurgent link is a bit old, but the most recent on the Web.

Technically, these two publications provide news, from a certain perspective, and call themselves journalist's and are part of the campus media. If they were to publish an investigative piece that blew open a huge controversy, surely they would be called on to reveal their sources. I wonder, would the shield laws protect them? I think that media that should be protected under the shield laws are ones where the journalists undergo a thorough editing process in which both the journalist and editors are all working under the same ethics, as defined by the various journalism societies like Society of Professional Journalists, etc. As much as the public may not believe that journalists are actually trying to help society, there are many who are, who work according to a set of ethics and standards that hold objectivity, truth, fairness, balance and accuracy as the tenets of journalism. To live up to these tenets, they go through processes while reporting, writing and editing to ensure that the story presented is one that most accurately reflects what happened or is happening. I don't think bloggers abide by those same standards.

I think bloggers and journalists are different, fundamentally. Bloggers are an opportunity to tell a news story from the perspective of someone involved. I don't think they should try to be journalists in the same way that professional journalists are. I think bloggers should play up their strengths: immediacy, opinion, reflection, subjectivity. By blurring the line too much between these two worlds, we're only going to decrease both's validity.

What is blogging?

"A Weblog is focused on finding and linking to the work of others as opposed to original reporting. Romenesko is aimed at the journalism community, a group that’s pretty sophisticated about appraising sources of information. Poynter has made a conscious decision to alert those journalists/readers to journalism news without characterizing the quality of the information. We leave it to the readers to judge the reliability of the original material," according to Romenesko Blog

"As hard as the media tries to be inclusive, we cannot be all things to all people. So why not invite people to be all things to each other? By asking community members to create weblogs, you could include a wide range of views on your website -- broader and deeper than you could possibly include in print or on the air for every story -- and measure success not just by pageviews or revenue, but by the increased diversity of your coverage," according to Julie Moos's Blog

So blogging, at least the type that isn't just someone's personal online diary, seems to be an opportunity to actually democratize the media. Why aren't the communities frequently excluded from news coverage jumping on board with the blogging trend? Why aren't newspaper taking this potentially revolutionary trend more seriously? Does it threaten the printed word?

I think many print journalists are afraid for the future of newspapers and magazines because of the growing popularity of online, grassroots journalism. They believe online journalism will make their printed word obsolete. But fearing the trend won't make it go away. Their fear will ensure their obsoleteness, in fact, because they will refuse to embrace the trend, to strengthen their professional "objective" work with a more personal, "subjective" reflection on their work.

I think too, that the point about giving sub-communities their own Web log under the bigger community's web space is a great idea. It would empower people to cover themselves in their own words and would strengthen both the newspaper's coverage and also trust as an accurate reflection of the community. I would love to work for a newspaper that hosted blogs from its readers.

Journalism or farming?

I've been reading this pop-culture science book called "The Long Emergency" about many of the struggles and challenges we face as a species in the 21st century with the coming climate changes, oil shortages and general failing of our current economic and political systems. The author is a journalist who has written for the NYTimes magazine, The Atlantic and also has written several books. He's an engaging writer, definitely draws from a plethora of sources and creates a convincing argument/portrayal of the future that is scary and frightening.

He talks about how America will have to undergo a painful downsizing, localizing of how we produce goods (mainly food) and how we won't be able to continue our pursuit of bigger, better, more, etc. Globalization, he argues, is a passing trend that is unsustainable. In the future, all of the things we take for granted (driving 75 miles to work, eating mangos in December, and travelling whereever we want) won't be cheap commodities. He discusses how value and monetary systems will become obsolete concepts leftover from the hey-day of industrial capitalism. In the future, after Peak Oil and drastic climatic changes, skills like non-industrial agriculture and carpentry will be what decides who survives and who doesn't. (The thought strikes me that no one gets out alive in the end, but whatever.)

This book renewed the on-going debate in my head: should I be learning skills like organic farming and other basic wildnerness survival skills or should I continue on this journalism trip? I'm not too sure. I'm not a big fan of the paranoia sown by pop-culture scientists/journalists, but he does raise important points, like how am I preparing for the future after our country's oil addiction goes through the inevitable and painful withdrawl? The conflicts over scare resources aren't going to be solved diplomatically, if the Iraq War redux has shown us anything, and I'm not going to depend of the idiots on the East Coast to help me out.

My dream would be to strike a nice balance between practicing journalism and growing my own food. Eventually I think our country is going to go through some very painful bubble-popping when energy stops being cheap and our industrial functions cease operating as usual. I just wonder how to prepare for this?

Going beyong the couches getting blown out the meth house's windows

"Be skeptical of everything. Ask skeptical quetions." Those two sentences reverberated in my head yesterday during Steve Suo's guest lecture in one of my journalism classes. Suo was the lead investigative reporter on The Oregonian's story about "The Unnecessary Epidemic," a multi-day series that covered the meth crisis affecting our nation.

Suo gave a presentation about the computer-assisted-reporting techniques he used to uncover a lot of the startling statistics and assertions made in the series. One of the most important: meth production is a highly organized endeavor and more than 80% of meth in this country comes from Mexican drug cartels who have super labs in the fields of Calif. Suo showed us, using simplified line graphs, how he kept finding the same type of line graph for disparate statistics. In other words, the graph for meth purity, meth rehab patients, arrests, fraud, forgery and other property crimes followed the exact same flow on their charts, mirroring the same highs and lows, which also coordinated with several acts on the federal government's part.

Suo gave a striking explanation for why meth suddenly became such a huge problem in the US and even more so, a solution to fix it.

But that's where class ended. We didn't get an opportunity as much to ask questions about the suggestions Suo made throughout the story about what the government could be doing to fix the meth epidemic. I was curious what he thought about making assertions about what could be done. I can't think of other examples in the media, at least none in a mainstream "objective" newspaper, where the journalist went beyond making a point/exposing the more complicated backstory, to actually saying what could/should be done about it.

He mentioned that in the years since he began covering this enormous story, some legislation has been enacted and government officials are starting to do something about it as a direct result of The Oregonian's coverage. Every reporter's dream. But I have to wonder if the government started doing something about it because of the direct "the government could be doing something about it"/"the drug companies have stopped the government's efforts in the past" statements that Suo made throughout the story, or if the statistics and other information convinced the politicians.

I'm not saying I'm against making assertions about could and should, but what I'm saying is, at what point to we become activists as journalists in our writing? Obviously a story about the enormous meth problem is fairly black and white about what type of assertions/suggestions you're going to make about what could be done: cut off the supply, make it harder to get the ingredients, etc. But in a story more grey, say about acquaintance rape, trying to make assertions based on statistics could be extremely misleading given the growing phenomenon of falsely accusing someone after waking up and regretting a drunken night of sex.

I'm not quite sure what I'm trying to get at, other than I was a bit surprised to see so many could (which often means should) statements throughout the first-day coverage. It made the story far more biting and interesting, but it also sounded like the story had a voice, a narrator, whose beliefs were motivating the writing.

Covering gay teenagers in the media

A journalist came to the UO to speak about sex and sex in the media. I went thinking, "Great. Yet another lecture about how the media screws up sex and sensationalizes it. I know this," and left thinking "Benoit actually had some good tips on how to go beyond the typical media coverage."

Covering sex in a non-sensationalist way begins with being thoughtful about it. Then it takes months of immersing yourself in the people's lives to actually understand their perspective and experience before you can begin writing about sex and sexuality from a non-mainstream angle.

I wonder though, does it also take having a similar sexual orientation?

Benoit didn't come out and say he was gay until at least 2/3 of the way through his lecture, and it was in a passing reference to his surprise at 11 and 12-year olds coming out when he didn't even know he was gay until college. Benoit has won numerous awards for his coverage of different gay communities, from gay teens to married black men who have gay affairs to Midwestern towns that change street names because of their gay connotations. Throughout his lecture I wondered, does his own sexual orientation make him uniquely able to cover gay America? In some ways, I think of his reporting and coverage as more accurate because I have to believe he would take something so personal seriously enough to get it right. But at the same time, I wonder if his personal attachment to the story might bias the way he goes about reporting, seeking sources and even how he interviews people.

I wondered the implications for myself and journalism as a whole. Surely journalists aren't Objective in the sense that they talk to everyone equally, seek out everyone with the same sort of intensity. Even in my limited experience, I know that sometimes, okay more than I would like to admit, I don't try as hard to talk to a source as I do to others in the story. I have never not tried to talk to someone, but I have called others repeatedly, damn near stalked them, because I wanted their voice in the story. Also, I will spend more time with some sources because I want to cultivate a relationship with them, and I don't necessarily spend that same amount of extra qualitative time with others.

So again, I wonder the implications of journalists covering stories that have relevancy to their personal lives. I certainly don't have an answer. But I know that the stories I cover where I have had some previous, personal experience with the concept, are the ones that I'm better able to report on because I know where to go, who to talk to, and most importantly, have authority/legitimacy in the sources' view because of my own personal connection.

An example: in the recent ODE coverage about The Insurgent and the Newman Center (a Catholic campus ministry), I told members of the center that I was raised Catholic, but no longer practiced. I made it clear that I wasn't there to debate the issue in the story, or even to give my opinion, but was drawn into a conversation about Catholicism anyway because of my experience with it.

I suspect that as this story unfolds, the person I chatted with will be more willing to pro-actively call me and tell me what's up from his perspective because of this first conversation about the Church. Perhaps that will translate to breaking a story ahead of other media outlets. But, I still wonder if that was the right thing to do.

Back to Benoit. His stories have provided a much more in-depth and thoughtful look at gay communities around the country, has shown that gay people are not weird freaks that live in closests on another planet. His stories humanize our neighbors, children and community members, and in doing so, enrich our understanding of our society.

But what about journalists covering stories that echo in their personal lives?

Becoming a blogger

Is a bit of a misleading title for this entry because I already blog on a different site, but about completely different topics, namely nothing journalistic.

Being a blogger is a strange phenomenon: you write your thoughts in an isolated vacumn, interacting only with a computer, but then random people from the world over can read your thoughts and respond. No wonder people are addicted to blogging, it's an adrenaline rush. Someone should do a brain-scanning study on bloggers before they blog, while they're blogging, and after they post an entry to see how their brain waves change.

The flip side of blogging is its enormous tendency to produce absolutely meaningless crap like entries about someone's breakfast or their most recent romantic foible. Too often, people blog about themselves only, forgetting that no one else is as invested in them as they are, nor does anyone else care about the little tidbits that make up a person's personality. Am I too cynical? Perhaps.

I'm excited to have a focused blog that requires me to respond to one topic, set of related topics. It'll be better than the other blog I write, which is mostly creative writing and bad poetry.

Here are links to good advice on blogging:

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=75383

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=75665

Blogging in the post post-modern world where journalism happens with cell phones and internet diary posts

I'm a journalism student constantly questioning whether my formal journalism studies are going to help me in a world where journalism increasingly happens on the street, is recorded by non-professionals, and defies many of the rules regulating fact gathering. Does the fact that I know AP style even matter? Does it give me more authority in story-telling/news reporting than the person who was there and actually witnessed an event? Do I earn extra credit points for knowing a writing style for news reporting exists when many news consumers wish there was more emotion, personal experience inserted in the story?
I don't know those answers, but I do know that writing about news in the first person is novel, violates a few of the fundamental tenents of journalism and is, strangely, wonderful. Blogging feels more honest than straight-forward, 3rd person journalism. It's inserting complexity and my subjectivity throughout the story rather than masking it with through my presentation of the facts. Too often, we forget that the way a story is portrayed significantly impacts the understanding/interpretation of the story. By insisting that journalists are objective and not a part of the story is a lie, one perpetuated far too long by journalism schools.
I'm young, have been a reporter for less months than fingers on one hand, yet I can think of at least 5 stories where my presence directly influenced how the people acted. Just knowing the press is around changes how you act, talk, and recall. People lie to me on a fairly frequent basis as a result of this sentence, "Hi, I'm Susan Goodwin from the Oregon Daily Emerald." Bam. Introduction. Commence lying, leaving out information.
Blogging can be a great way to talk about those aspects of a news story that an editor would normally remove, i.e. how you found out a piece of information, the background to your reporting, what you couldn't verify with the 3-4 sources, your opinion, etc.
At the same time, there's the danger of biasing yourself. If people read your news stories and also your blog, it would raise serious questions about your integrity as an unbiased observer/writer. I'm not sure if there's an answer to that issue, but it's one that seems to be getting larger as blogging establishes itself as a legitimate form of journalism.
I find it even more ironic that I'm blogging for a formal journalism class. Ha.