But, then, its randomness is kind of the point. “My hope is that it gives people the feeling that they’re riding along with me,” Greene says of the series. And that along-for-the-ride sensibility also means audiences share in the freewheeling quality of the trip itself. The stories we hear come to us via shoeleather’s sometimes strange serendipity. Greene met Bob Westerfield, a Dayton resident, while Westerfield was on a snowmobiling getaway in Paradise, Michigan. A few days later, Greene produced a piece, datelined “Exit 52, Dayton, Ohio,” exploring Westerfield’s troubled business: creating scoreboards for high school athletics. “Schools are putting off purchases that aren’t essential,” Greene notes in the piece, “and the advertisers that help pay for the scoreboards are also short on cash.”
Through Westerfield’s plight, Greene examines the financial struggles of Ohio public schools—”Westerfield knows his company is a gauge of the recession. He sees every day how desperate schools are for money”—and the state’s broader financial struggles. As Greene drove to Dayton, Governor Stickland’s State of the State speech played on his car radio. “I must ask all Ohioans to accept the sacrifices that these times demand,” the governor told his listeners. As Greene noted to his own listeners, “He said no one will be spared.”
For all its use of social media tools—Twitter, Flickr, Google maps, blogs, etc.—”100 Days” is about the old as much as the new. The series takes traditional (which is to say, time-honored) approaches to newsgathering—shoe-leather reporting, personal conversations, an openness to new information—and repurposes them for the digital age. The series harnesses the power of social media to produce stories that are evocative and informative and, by most measures, important.
Which doesn’t mean the reaction to its stories has been uniformly positive. “I am irritated with how everyone in the press thinks the first 100 days of someone’s presidency is important,” Kelly Beard writes on a comments page. “What a useless metric to measure someone by. Get it together NPR and stop perpetuating this pointless number.” Wanda Wynn took issue with Greene’s story about the less-booming-than-normal snowmobiling season in Northern Michigan. “Please, could we have something about the positive side of of things about the down turn in the economy,” she declares. “I am thinking of the many pounds of carbon dioxide not released into the atmosphere.”
Still, “100 Days” is a testament to what a guy with a voice recorder and a camera can do these days…when he also has a decent internet connection. The series doesn’t try to be more than it is; in many ways, in fact, it revels in what it’s not. Though Greene’s reporting is original, his platform is largely outsourced. The online versions of Greene’s stories link to Twitter and Flickr feeds, and to his various contributions to NPR’s Planet Money blog. The series landing page features a prominently embedded Google map. And its stories themselves practice the kind of narrative transparency that sees journalism not just as a product, but as a practice—the old it’s the journey, not the destination cliche writ reportorial. In the Stone Soup Kitchen in Atlanta, Greene meets Sam Terrell, the cafe’s kitchen manager. He keeps his culinary job just to pay the bills, Terrell tells Greene; but his real passion is rapping. Terrell “came outside with me so we could pop one of his CDs into my rental car,” Greene reports.
“This is called ‘The Best Years’ right here,” Terrell said as one of his songs played. “We’re kind of being ironic. At the same time, this is the best time in our life, it’s also the economy’s bad, everything is sort of crazy, everybody’s losing their jobs, and, you know, record companies are kind of slow. But we’re still out here enjoying ourselves, making the best rap, just living it up the best we can, because these are the best years of our life.”
I bought Terrell’s CD for $10, so his message and his music are sticking with me as I drive on south.
The trouble I have with these journalistic 'road trips' is that they treat the majority of the country as 'out-there' land . . . messages back to civilization (i.e., Washington, DC) from the wilds. This is the sort of framing narrative, with vocabulary to match, that is the subtext of accusations about the ideological slant of American political journalism . . . 'Middle America' is objectified and subtly marginalized.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 2 Mar 2009 at 01:16 PM
That's a good point, Mark, one that I think is largely valid: there are few things more annoying/offensive than journalism that, either out of smugness or a lack of self-consciousness--or both--takes an anthropological approach to reporting. And a woefully high percentage of the parachute-into-the-heartland reports the national media produce (cf: campaign season) are guilty of that kind of glibness.
But I don't think "100 Days" is guilty of it. I mean, sure, on the surface, you have a national (even worse: NYC-based!) reporter taking a road trip into the area that Smug Coastals often shorthand as "flyover country," and then reporting on what he finds. The potential for anthropology inherent in that formula is high. But, to my mind, there's absolutely nothing in Greene's reporting to suggest that he's indulged in it, or that he's treated the areas along his route as "'out-there' land" or otherwise marginalized them. To me, the series' stories reflect an earnest desire to learn and report about a section of the country that is all to often overlooked by the national media.
Now, sure, the line between reporting about people and objectifying them is thin...and you're right to be wary of the road trip trope in general. But, then, it's not fair to hold other reporters' transgressions against a piece of journalism that's trying, actually, to counteract them.
#2 Posted by Megan Garber, CJR on Mon 2 Mar 2009 at 03:35 PM
Megan, I appreciate your response . . . the problem for American political journalism is unintentionally reinforced by your reference to places 'often overlooked by the national media'. The people reported on 'are' the nation; they are often overlooked by the NY/DC media, not the 'national' media. Indeed, contempt for 'local' media (provincial, shallow) is a staple of orthodox press criticism.
Yet, if you think about it, NPR is inseparable in its general tone and story selection from its Washington DC environment. The identity of The New York Times relies heavily on an Upper East Side, white, professional sensibility. One has to look askance when a respected publication such as, say, The New Yorker, is critical of Rush Limbaugh or the Republican Party for being 'too white'; there are few 'whiter' voices in the United States than the ones named above. (I'd wager that Limbaugh's listeners are more diverse in socio-economic class and ethnicity than the readership of The New Yorker.) The dominant editorial identity is white, urban, college-educated (social sciences and liberal arts) and affluent. This class of people is seldom, if ever, held up by NPR or similar information sources as worthy of examination as a distinct and recognizable social type, i.e., 'objectified'. As the flag-carriers of Modernism, they are exempt from any suggestion that their own values and ideology are the particular characteristics of a particular class of people - because most journalists on some level belong to that class and accept its assumptions. The urban bias is both intrinsic to 'the media' and unavoidable, I suppose.
This is a problem. No one who relies on the mainstream media would guess that Texas now has a greater population (meaning job creation) and more Fortune 500 companies located there than New York. Texas is still something very alien to the NPR/NY Times sensibility . . . dusty, dry, full of strange people who vote for Republicans. In fact, the states that continue to grow are these weird places in the Sunbelt, and the states that continue to decline are blue and Snowbelt. The big news organizations, however, remain blue-state bound, which means there has been something of a disconnect between journalists and the country they are reporting on, and I think that's a problem.
To its credit, CJR has occasionally pointed out examples of this provincialism, such as referring to any left-wing politician with a southern or midwestern background as a 'populist', though his or her positions may be strictly Martha's Vineyard and Malibu.
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 3 Mar 2009 at 01:20 PM
gee, i wante green to come to my town but don't know how to twitter...
anyway, this town, klamath falls Oregon is amazing. I feel like here I have learned what a community is about-- people help each other here, coworkers are generous w/ their time and their resources. A special place,
#4 Posted by anet, CJR on Wed 29 Apr 2009 at 02:03 AM