One of my old editors once told me that journalism was “privileged tourism”—a chance to not just visit a place but to get under its skin; I prefer the description I heard in a bar a few weeks ago: “doing stupid shit so others don’t have to”.
Insofar as it’s not an oxymoron, I’ve been a professional journalist for a decade and a half. During that time, I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had editors who indulge ludicrous stories, from digging into Singaporean parents’ weird obsession with hiring private eyes to follow their children, to spending a week on a remote beach on West Papua to watch scientists wrestle with 10-metre-long sharks, or flying to the women’s youth world cup in a Blackhawk helicopter piloted by the Crown Prince of Jordan. I’ve reported on Filipino casino heists, bear-infested diamond mines in the Northwest Territories, champagne-swilling Angolan steel magnates and revolutionary nutcrackers in the Brazilian rainforest; rebellious Malaysian cartoonists, Danish amateur rocketeers and an insane scheme to build a massive solar plant in Tunisia during the Arab Spring.
But these kinds of stories are getting harder and harder to place. One of the enduring regrets of my career stems from my failure in 2014 to find a home for a piece about a former rockstar and convicted racketeer turned soy-meat billionaire driving around Bulgaria trying to save Syrian refugees with cash and buckets of artificial beef.
Some of the big publishers are out of the game entirely; others have been pivoting to video and back so fast that they’re now on the sidelines throwing up.
I never pivoted to video. A producer once told me I wasn’t symmetrical enough for television, which still stings. But I have been inside the content sausage machine. I’ve seen freshly-minted graduates dressed like children’s TV characters live-blogging the weather, seemingly unaware that it never ends. I’ve sat in on a lecture about how, according to Google analytics, the best headline ever written was something like: “Dead birds: Dead birds fall from sky in dead bird falling crisis”. I’ve had the ignominy of having a story picked up by the Drudge Report, leading to a million page views from that most important of demographics: deep state conspiracy nuts.
I worry that by the time CNN has spent its last penny 3D-printing the news onto bricks and throwing them through people’s windows, and The Guardian has started bribing baristas to dust their latest hot-takes in cinnamon on top of oat-milk turmeric lattes, the joy of actually reporting a story will have disappeared entirely, and all we’ll have left is bland content.
This is not just a matter of personal taste. I think losing proper dispatches impoverishes journalism, and culture generally, and adds to the ignorance and polarisation that is currently squatting over politics and society.
How do you ever really understand events if you don’t get the context, the detail, a sense of place and character? I think if you want to know what’s happening, you have to get on the ground, to sniff the halitosis of geopolitics—or at least pay someone else to do it for you.
Which is why I’m starting The Blower. I’ll be sending original dispatches and photography directly into subscribers’ inboxes, producing a regular weekly roundup of essential storytelling on global affairs and taking deep-dives into important stories and issues so that readers can be better informed on what’s happening in their world—or at least so that they can fill awkward silences during disappointing Tinder dates with nuanced commentary on Malaysian identity politics.