What should we be writing about?

I see that the Haiti earthquake is fading from the front pages and headlines, as of course it must do.  It reminds me of a presentation our friend Keith Woods (who is on his way to National Public Radio) made at an Images & Voices of Hope Summit one year.   His brother was a prison guard at a prison in the South of the US and was a victim in a prison take-over when prisoners overpowered prison guards imprisoning them and changing clothes with them.  When the outside world got wind of what had happened, police officers were afraid to shoot because they didn’t know who were the prisoners and who were the guards.  Keith talked about the despair he and his family felt as the stalemate wore on and the story fell from the front page, and then from the front section of the paper, and finally out of the news altogether.  We take great comfort and feel a sense of solidarity when our societies share our concerns.  We can lose hope when the attention of the world seems to move onto the next big event or story.

This is why I love a project of the Renaissance Journalism Center at San Francisco State University to return to Viet Nam and revisit the effects of Agent Orange three generations later (http://www.rjcmedia.org/the-vietnam-reporting-project).  The Center has engaged a diverse team of journalists to investigate the story and bring it back into public awareness.  I love this project not only because of the importance of the subject and the comfort it will bring to the victims, but also because it reminds us that media at its best isn’t just event driven.  We can decide what matters most and move, sometimes collectively as RJC is doing, to place a story in the public consciousness.  We can make time for conversations about what it is that we should be writing about, reading about, and talking about.  Now all we have to do is figure out what that is.