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At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose both what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that clarifies our American political moment going into the presidential election in 2020. It’ll be a process. I’m Jeremy Borden, independent journalist, reluctant political junkie, with bylines in publications big and small but with a sense that more of us in the media need to tilt at windmills if the mess that has been made of the American Experiment is going to continue.
So far, I’ve announced the #GonzoPrimary by defining the broad parameters for what healthy media coverage might look like as we start from scratch. Most recently, I dove into the time when the GOP thought it had died and the insane turn of events that led to new charges against Jeffrey Epstein.
Gonzo Primary Weekly: Taking a Step Back
Iowa Caucus Countdown: 185 days.
Mark Twain allegedly once said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Brevity is an art. Strong nouns, followed by strong verbs, punctuated early, often and with force. And a point somewhere in there, too.
I’m also beginning to think that brevity is something of a necessity, unless absolutely called for in a digital age when we face a torrent of information 24/7. It doesn’t mean forcing something short that should be long—that needs exploration and context—but thinking strategically about how to get something out in sprints instead of marathons.
Since the beginning of this experiment, ahem, this project, I’ve promised and hoped to be transparent. A friend remarked to me early on that it seemed that I was seeking to redefine journalism and show “them” how it’s done.
Yeah, there’s some of that, an exasperation with the status quo. But it’s also a teeth-grating annoyance that I have with commentary on media and politics without substance, i.e. original reporting, or, at least, analysis. The D.C. cyclone feeds itself through a torrent of news all filtered through basically the same Washington prism. Sometimes, that’s OK and it’s a prism that matters, but it’s hardly the only one. There’s also reason to believe that our current American woe has been created or magnified by a media obsessed with probing two sides of a story rather than looking for nuance, on display in almost hilarious (if it weren’t so hard to watch) fashion by CNN at this week’s Democratic debates.
I am an independent researcher and journalist, a freelancer, at the whim of my next project and paycheck. Sometimes that means juggling five projects at a time and it’s easy to set this whole thing aside. I’ve set the bar high and I worry too much about failure, which explains the dust collecting on ideas and just-started posts and why this hasn’t hit your inbox in awhile.
In that vein, what can I contribute when the other projects are filling up my Wunderlist and the Google calendar is blinding? I want to adhere to the Gonzo Primary’s tenets, letting real humanoid voters and readers direct coverage, exploring life on the ground in key states, explore candidates records on issues over politics and using or calling attention to data-driven analysis and campaign finance that shadows and controls our political narrative.
But I also want to report from a fresh perspective on politics — and to me, that means state-based movements, right and left, that are too often ignored or dismissed. It also means making sure things don’t get lost, which I’m worried has been the case with my much longer weekly digests. So I’ll report and write as I go along and not worry so much about getting the whole thing out there in silky prose. Easier said than done, but the first step to doing is saying, right?
So I’m going to focus on shorter bites around these themes, an older blog style now becoming new in newsletter form. Yeah, this is probably already too long. But it’s not an artificial metric and hey, I never claimed to be perfect.
But most of all, if anything, the outlook I would want in the world is one that challenges convention with a purpose. And that means reporting with fresh eyes. I loved this particular bit from Jacqui Banaszynski at Neiman Storyboard recently who took on the Twain adage of only writing what you know. How should journalists confront the tendency to fall back on our own comfortable tropes and assumptions?
We report.
We report on the worlds we land in, and try to leave our own projections and assumptions behind.
We report on ourselves to be aware of the assumptions we carry with us and the narratives we've absorbed in our individual cultural and generational bubbles.
We report on our primary audiences to find out if they understand our references and allusions. This is more important than ever in journalism that has a global reach and tries to portray a multi-cultural world.
All this is easier to preach than to practice, of course. But if writing best means writing what we know, then most of our work has to be devoting to the knowing of the things we write about. And that means it needs to be devoted to reporting.
Observing, digging into issues, scraping and clawing for the best version of the truth — and documenting the process—one nugget at a time. That’s why I promise from here on out, even if it’s not as often as I and perhaps (I hope) you would want, to focus on reporting in bits, something that City Bureau is big on to develop trust and journalistic accountability. I’ll look to keep it short. And I’ll try to challenge convention through fresh eyes and a devotion to reporting and analyzing over recycling, then documenting when I get it right and following up when I don’t.
Any thoughts?
The above quote from journalist Jacqui Banaszynski was originally attributed to Neiman Labs; it is from Neiman Storyboard and has been corrected.