Every Story a Story

I was flying high above Olympia looking down at the twin halogen pythons saying hello to each other as they passed in the night upon the freeway. (Cars. I'm talking about cars.)

Four days earlier I had flown from Fort Lewis to Minneapolis for leave; now it’s a flight into Seattle and then waiting for my ticket to Kuwait and then Basra and then home. A plane and a room and a train and a room and a room and a room and a plane.

I thought of all the stories trapped in each of those cars, waiting to get out. It’s a game I used to play as a kid, and now I’m older and I do it for a living.
My slated title in Iraq: new media specialist. I don’t actually know what that means; I can only assume it means Facebook. People have reported everywhere that the whole Web 2.0 thing can only lead to a glut of information and a dearth of wisdom and that soon people will reach the point where they start tuning out this ever-present noise.

I disagree, but then again I’m barely 19.

At the NBC Digital Journalism School at the New York Film Academy, they give us all the usual YOUR CAREER FIELD IS METLTING! MELTING! stuff, but they also instilled in us a belief that in this fractured brave new world, the journalist is more important than ever as THE GATEKEEPER. By using journalistic ethics and practices to ensure that only the best and the truest rise to the top, theoretically the new journalist can inform the public in ways that ol’ Greely and Pulitzer could only dream.

We’re planning for our content to automatically go to yer ol’ Facebook, Myspace, twitter, picasa, flikr, youtube and other sites with wacky made-up names. Now, this plan may fall under too much info territory, but there are times you just have to know RIGHT NOW that the 34th Red Bull Infantry Division sponsored an Easter egg hunt.

I guess we’re operating on the assumption that every single person has a story, and every story has a home. Hopefully, we’ll be to use this Interweb thing to our advantage.

Also: I haven’t posted much lately. I shall, more often, I promise. That said, we must till our garden. (Ask me what that reference means. Do it!)