Orwell on Book Reviewers

One of my indulgences over Christmas was a little collection of George Orwell essays, one of those "Great Ideas" books from Penguin. I'd only read 1984 and Animal Farm before this, and I'd like to read his journalism and nonfiction - particularly now that his work isn't being crammed down my throat by high school English teachers.

I enjoyed (kinda) his essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," in which he describes such professionals as sad, frumpy little men surrounded by dusty papers and half-empty cups of tea.

"[T]he prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash ... but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever. The reviewer, jaded though he may be, is professionally interested in books, and out of the thousands that appear annually, there are probably fifty or a hundred that he would enjoy writing about. If he is a top-notcher in his profession he may get hold of ten or twenty of them: more probably he gets hold of two or three. The rest of his work however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug. He is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time."

Man, Orwell must have been a hoot at parties.

The Ezra Klein Show

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We've been seeing a lot of Ezra Klein on MSNBC lately. Washington Post's "Wonkblog" editor is now Rachel Maddow's go-to substitute host, and there are rumours floating around that he may get his own show. That's how Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry got their start on the network, after all.

I like the guy and he's really smart, so I wouldn't mind seeing him join the lineup. He needs work, though. You can tell he's trying to develop more on-screen charisma, but right now he's copying Maddow's inflections and mannerisms too much. (Don't worry, Ezra, Chris Hayes used to do that too and he's much better now.)

If the show rumours are true, my suspicion is that MSNBC is trying to tap into the geek love generated by Nate Silver's polling triumph in the 2012 election - which is funny, because Nate Silver apparently hates punditry.

P.S. Yes, I know I talk about MSNBC people all the time. I haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, it's just that Fox News is too absurd and CNN is too boring, and all my other favourite news sources are on the Internet. I think of the network as a tidy case study of everything that is good and bad about cable news.

Richard Engel, Superman

I'm relieved to hear that NBC's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and his team are safe after being kidnapped and held for five days in Syria:

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Engel's ordeal reminded me of his theory about the four stages of stress a reporter goes through while covering war zones, outlined in his book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq:

• Stage One: I'm invincible. Nothing can hurt me. I'm Superman.
• Stage Two: What I'm doing is dangerous. I might get hurt over here. I'd better be careful.
• Stage Three: What I'm doing is really dangerous. I am probably going to get hurt over here no matter how careful I am. Math and probability and time are working against me.
• Stage Four: I have been here too long. I am going to die over here. It is just a matter of time. I've played the game too long.

It's not time just yet, thank goodness. Welcome back, Richard.

Six Months In

I have been a full-time reporter at a daily paper for six months now. I made a list of things I'd learned when I was fresh out of journalism school, so I thought I'd add some of my practical experiences so far.

• Working in a small town is rough at first. It takes ages to figure out all the local gossip and even longer for people to trust you; and in the meantime there's nothing to do on the weekends and you can't get a decent coffee anywhere. But it's worth it in the long run, because you end up trying a bit of everything and learning about a part of society you might not be familiar with.
• Nothing really prepares you for interviewing a man who just got laid off from his job, or facing an angry parent whose child is being bullied at school because of an article you wrote. All you can do is stay calm, be fair, and try to have as much empathy as possible. Never lose sight of the fact that you are affecting people's lives in a very real way.
• You'll also get a lot of political staffers and corporate PR people angry with you, and there is aaaaabsolutely nothing wrong with that. You just annoy the crap out of them. (Politely.)

The Onion: "F*ck Everything"

The Onion nails it with their gut-wrenching article on the shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut - not just America's anger and despair, but also the thoughts running through reporters' heads as they try to cover a tragedy of this scale:

Despairing sources confirmed that the gunman, armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle—a fucking combat rifle, Jesus—walked into a classroom full of goddamned children where his mother was a teacher and, good God, if this is what the world is becoming, then how about we just pack it in and fucking give up, because this is no way to live. 

I mean, honestly, all 315 million Americans confirmed.

Sometimes journalistic detachment is impossible.

Character Sketch

A sketch from Michael Arthur of playwright Tony Kushner and MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow at the "Duets" event at Joe's Pub in New York City, via MaddowBlog.

From the New Yorker: "[My persona is] not a fake me, but it is a slice of me. Like, I am a person who has depression, and I don’t let depressed Rachel on television."

Post-Industrial Journalism

Journos will find plenty to inspire and even more to worry about in "Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present", a study from Columbia Journalism School's Tow Centre. It's a dense read (check out Poynter's write-up if you're in a hurry) but worth setting aside an afternoon.

Basically, the report says that the transformation of American journalism is unavoidable, "that the journalism industry is dead but that journalism exists in many places", and journalists and news organisations have to be much more versatile in order to survive. Alarming, but kind of exciting if you like a challenge.

Hobbit Politics

I was enchanted with Lord of the Rings when the first film came out in 2001. I saw Fellowship in cinema literally a dozen times, and let's be honest, where do you think I got the idea to move to New Zealand in the first place?

So it's been interesting to live here during the filming and production of The Hobbit and realise just how much political maneuvering goes on in New Zealand's film industry these days - including the Prime Minister signing autographs on the red carpet, because he all but made these movies himself. And won the Rugby World Cup! Read it and weep, Labour.

You can get a sense of the behind-the-scenes lobbying and PR scandals from this political round-up by Bryce Edwards at the New Zealand Herald.

"Hollywood, by and large, swung in behind Barack Obama in the recent US presidential elections," Mr Edwards says. "Our own leader's relationship with the 'dream factory' is somewhat different, involving John Key swinging the Government, its limos, our taxes and even our laws in behind Hollywood."

Liberty Booze

If you want to brush up on the basics of the American Constitution, you could do worse than making yourself a drink (or nursing a hangover, in my case) and curling up with What Prohibition Has Done to America by Fabian Franklin.

Fabian was a civil engineer and mathematician who went on to become editor of the Baltimore News and later associate editor of the New York Evening Post.

He worked himself into a conservative fury over Prohibition in 1922, accusing supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment of perverting the Constitution, undermining America's respect for the law, destroying our federal system and weakening our sense of individual liberty.

The Founding Fathers, he declared, "did not for a moment entertain the idea of imposing upon future generations, through the extraordinary sanctions of the Constitution, their views upon any special subject of ordinary legislation. Such a proceeding would have seemed to them far more monstrous, and far less excusable, than that tyranny of George III and his Parliament which had given rise to the American Revolution."

Study Project

I've given in and bought a Kindle. The part of me that loves rummaging through second-hand bookshops is horrified, but in the end practicality won out. My reading list is too long, and I don't have the time or money to buy hardcover books, or wait for paperback editions, and then lug them around in boxes every time I change addresses. I'll still buy books that have special meaning to me, but for the most part I've gone digital.

I plan to step up my reading on journalism and politics, and the Kindle could be really useful for that. I can download free resources from websites like Project Gutenberg and then step away from the Internet to avoid distractions (ahem), and I can buy the latest books without traveling to a city or shipping them all the way from America. Not a lot of fancy politically-themed bookshops in Greymouth, you see.

What I'm hoping is that by following journalists and scholars on social media and doing independent study while learning basic reporting skills at my job, I can gain some insight and sharpen my focus on where I want my career to go. A four-year journalism degree is beyond my reach for now, but I suspect I can learn quite a lot just by knowing where to look.

We'll see how it goes. Expect more ramblings about what I'm reading, along with the usual snarky jokes. Like these ones!