Nicholas Kristof brings us the story of Darfur

Tonight I met a man who had been shot in the throat and left for dead in a pile of bodies.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof introduced me and a packed lecture hall to the man by way of a slide show of his trips to Africa during his keynote address, the closing event of the University of Oregon’s weekend-long symposium on the crisis in Darfur called, “Witnessing Genocide: Representation and Responsibility.”

From the picture, we could see his twisted arms and scarred neck. The day he was shot, his village had been burned and his family murdered by janjaweed, the tribe the Sudanese government claims not to support. What Kristof has witnessed, however, shows the opposite. One side has bows and arrows. The other has AK-47s.

“There’s no question of the level of Sudanese government’s support,” Kristof said.

The situation in Darfur began as a rebellion against the government. The government responded by systematically terrorizing and killing three African tribes, he explained. “These are rational pragmatic people who saw a problem and thought the simplest way to solve it was to slaughter a lot of people.”

The death count of the past four years is unknown, but estimates run as high as 500,000.

The man Kristof told us about who lay bleeding from the neck in a pile of bodies that included his mother and father maybe one of the dead. But he didn’t die that day.

His brother had been shot in the foot but was able to run, escaping the janjaweed’s pillaging. When the brother returned to bury his family, he discovered his still-breathing brother. The man carried his brother for the next 49 days, traveling only by night, fleeing the country along with 30,000 others.

That was back in 2004. The situation has grown much worse. And the stories Kristof has gathered in his many trips since are even more brutal. The janjaweed have begun using bayonets to gouge out eyes and mass rape is common. Listening to story after story, I kept thinking, “Why don’t I remember hearing anything about this?” How come Darfur has only recently become a part of the national conscious? (Is it a part of the national conscious?)

Maybe it’s because the Darfur genocide has only recently been covered by the corporate media, (and usually with some connection to Angelina Jolie). I wasn’t terribly surprised when Kristof told us that during all of 2004 the TV news network CBS devoted just three minutes of coverage to the situation in Darfur. In 2005 they cut that to two minutes.

“If you look at the historical significance … you feel embarrassed as a journalist,” Kristof said. I too felt embarrassed, not just for my profession’s obsession with the sensational, but more because I felt just as guilty by not taking time before today to educate myself on the story of Darfur.

It took looking into the bludgeoned face of a man from Darfur projected larger-than-life on the wall before me for me to really see and care.

Thank you Nicholas Kristof for bringing the story of Darfur to us.

NY Times video on the Darfur crisis




Nicholas Kristof's blog

Living it: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Immersion Journalism

As a reporter I was lucky to get to spend more than a day to report and write an article. That’s why I can’t imagine spending 12 years on a one project as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc did in writing Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx, the award-winning narrative nonfiction book about the lives of two Puerto Rican girls who grew up in the impoverished, drug-dealing world of the Bronx.

LeBlanc gave a speech to University of Oregon journalism students recently called “Journalism for the Long Haul,” an apt topic for a journalist well known for her time-intensive research methods.

To understand the lives of her subjects, she essentially lived right alongside them. During the day she was an editor of Seventeen magazine, but in the evening she hung out with her subjects in the Tremont Avenue ghetto. She sometimes even slept overnight at their apartments, changing into her work clothes the next morning in the lobby bathroom of her posh downtown New York City office building.

“Immersion journalism is journalism with the incredible luxury of time,” LeBlanc explained. “I had time to spare. I could spend as much time as needed.”

LeBlanc didn’t go to a journalism school so she didn’t know how to launch into the reporting. She just decided to visit the neighborhood and introduced herself to people on the street, saying, “Hi, I’m Adrian. I’m a journalist and I want to write about your life.”

She returned, day after day with her notebook and audio recorder and documented their lives.

These anthropological techniques aren’t usually taught in journalism school. Instead we’ve learned to gather information by holding question-and-answer interviews, often by phone to save time.

But while we save time, we lose so much more.

We aren’t privy to intimate details of our subjects’ lives. We don’t know their daily routines. And we often aren’t trusted with the real story. As a result, we tend to write flat lifeless accounts.

“For me reporting makes (life) happen in Technicolor,” LeBlanc said. “If you love it and you can figure out how to make it work (financially), there’s nothing like it.”

Since listening to Adrian, I’ve launched my own immersion-reporting project into the subculture of roller derby. I followed LeBlanc's lead. I went to the roller rink and said, "Hi I'm Katie. I'm a journalist and I want to write about roller derby."

In the past week and a half, I’ve spent 18 hours with the Emerald City Roller Girls. I’m just beginning to understand the team’s dynamics, practice routines, and individual players’ motivations and dreams. Already I know so much more than what I would from basic interviewing, but even more revealing is how much I realize I don’t yet know.

It’ll take time, but I’m looking forward to being there to watch their stories unfold.


To read an interview with LeBlanc by Michael Werner visit:

Etude, the University of Oregon's literary nonfiction online magazine

From Reporter to Blogger

In my career as a journalist I’ve worked at six newspapers and am now trying to establish myself as a freelance writer and independent blogger. I can’t help but wonder what I should take from my print journalism background into the blogosphere.

Some of the transferable skills seem obvious. Clean, concise, easy-to-follow writing is a must if you want to be read. As a reporter I learned to unfurl tangled issues related to urban development, environmental protection policy and social services and then lay the issues out in way that both educated and entertained. That’s a valuable skill in any kind of writing, blogging included.

Relevance seems like another biggie. I imagine, like in newspapers, writing about topics that matter to a wide-ranging audience will increase readership. But in this realm, a writer can choose her ideal audience and cater to them if she wants.

But on the flip side, if a topic has been written about ad nauseam online chances are you don’t want to blog on it unless you have something new to add. Blogs seem to have become popular for giving media consumers reports that traditional media outlets didn’t offer. In newspapers, content decisions are often based on what journalists think the audience needs to know. That’s why I had to slog through so many agendas of the planning and zoning boards. But in blogs it seems to be much more about what the audience wants to know. Media consumers today can act more like patrons at a salad bar, feeding on those reports in traditional media outlets and in the blogosphere that interest them most.

One aspect unique to blogging is the potential to hold a real discussion. I’m anxious to experience this side of blogging first hand. As a reporter I could never really participate in the discussion. I had to be objective, or at least I had to pretend not to be a politically minded being. Feeling obligating to turn off that part of my brain hurt my writing and reporting. I didn’t feel free to develop and share insights I gained from reporting.

Even when I spent months investigating and writing issues-based enterprise projects, I rarely felt like my writing generated much of a greater discussion. At least if the discussion was happening, I never saw it. I quit my last full-time newspaper job and moved to Central America for two years in the summer of 2004. Because of the timing of my leave, I haven’t experienced what it’s like to be a print journalist in a world where blogging rules. The only back-and-forth exchange that I experienced was the form of an occasional letter to the editor or personal email.

The nature of traditional media has been one-way communication, from the news gatherers to the masses. Real discussions used to take place only on a small scale, usually face-to-face or in the form of phone calls, letters or emails. But the Internet in general and blogging in particular have revolutionized how we communicate and share ideas because it offers a public venue for an infinitely large multi-directional exchange.

I’ve become a blog reader and now I’m anxious to be a part of the revolution as a blogger, one of the many who get to start the conversation.

What Journalists Can Learn from Bloggers
What Bloggers Can Learn from Journalists

The Bloated Blogosphere

Here I am adding yet another blog to the bloated blogosphere, where already more than 57 million blogs exist. My wee blog is just one of the about 75,000 added each day, which makes me wonder: Will anybody read this?

I imagine I’ll never build a readership similar to what I enjoyed when I worked for newspapers. I was a reporter for a 120,000 circulation daily corporate-owned paper in Florida charged with documenting and reporting the most important issues of the day. Now I’m one of millions of bloggers writing on whatever I want.

As I begin this venture, I can’t help but feel small. I guess I must put faith in the credo, “If you build it they will come.” So I’m building this blog as a venue for my own storytelling, my observations on the ever-changing face of mass media and my musings on the ever-present challenges of the writing life. I hope to be read as I was a newspaper reporter. But even more importantly I hope that this format will allow me to interact with my readers in a way that wasn’t possible before. I hope this blog can provide a setting for large and small discussions with anyone who cares to join.