A Untold Story welcome: a unsolicited, unofficial manifesto
As someone who often feels paralyzed by the sheer amount of information I sift through on a daily basis, part of me wonders whether the world needs another blog. That’s how I’ve justified my absence from much personal self-promotion, or, god forbid, having my own self-published forum. Writing in the first person, it often seems, is for chucking diatribes from the living room couch or hot-taking with abandon on Facebook.
That assumes, wrongly, that the world and the web is a binary of extremes, great and terrible, when we sure as hell know it’s not. There are good things happening, too, I try to remind myself. I’m pulled to this space on Medium in particular by Bill Simmons’ The Ringer and other sites that speak new-age web and imbibe on some low calorie fare but still, often enough, understand nuance, storytelling and the painful, painstaking craft that is this thing that involves, at the very least, an empty screen and a blinking cursor.
I have spent my adult life at newspapers — for which I’m both deeply grateful and mournful. It means I’m cynical about whether new, shiny and popular can possibly translate into work that transcends our generally petty and too often trite web and media dialogue.
To make plane my cynicism about these efforts, even as I embark on the online journey, this ain’t no golden age of the scribe or would-be storyteller. The waters are choppy and uncertain. The fact is, the only people who think the media landscape has changed or is changing for the better have fat institutional salaries and opine on the bright horizons ahead because their own livelihoods depend on it and, we all know basic psychology tells us, rationalize their own existence. Perhaps those who foresee the beautiful sunrises ahead have some kind of clairvoyance that I lack. A more normal response to the media environment of churn, baby , churn and the popcorn clickbait that we’ve become accustomed to is to quit, drink heavily, yell a lot, or silently bemoan our institutional crisis while scrambling from one lily pad to the next in hopes of outlasting the storm.
I’m (proudly) one of those lily hoppers: a fairly newly-minted freelancer that for the first time doesn’t have a newspaper to call home. I’ll note with certainty that the web, despite the proliferation of words and publications, has left much of the burden of reporting and original storytelling to legacy outlets. Look no further to this summer of violence and I hope we all note that while there is excellent coverage from online-only outlets, its still the gray ladies and the ink-stained men and women in the trenches who are doing the brunt of the heavy lifting. It’s also fair to say that while those efforts are valiant, it is not enough as legacy newspapers and television stations diminish in stature, bandwidth and values. How often during this election cycle — as the world seems to fall apart around us in violence and complex economic questions at home and abroad — have the websites of all of our top publications had four or five stories about Donald Trump and his latest tweet?
It’s not as if there are fewer stories to be told or fewer truths to uncover or explain. Simply, there just aren’t enough good journalists to uncover that truth or tell those stories given the economic reality that faces the news-gathering business. We are all worse off for it.
So why stay? I’m clinging white-knuckled to the lifeboat that is original journalism and storytelling because 1) I know no other thing and addictions don’t quit easy 2) a world without original storytelling, analysis and journalism — i.e. truth — isn’t one I want to be a part of and 3) because it’s sort of invigorating to jump into a dark deep end, waters choppy or no.
All that to deliver something of a promise and a manifesto in the form of this, my small contribution and, I hope, a permanent delay of my white flag moment: a blog called Untold Story that hopes to live up to lost ideals in bite-sized form.
This blog is by no means representative of the zenith of journalism, writing, analysis, news … but instead of despondent yelling, I’ll use a digital pen to try to make a difference, one small step, blog post, link at a time. Each story will ideally have kernels of the untold and will lead, over time and painstaking work, toward that ideal of an untold story, either narrative or investigative journalism that illuminates the world as it is.
I moved to Chicago recently from South Carolina by way of D.C. and North Carolina because I see this city as being at the center, for better or worse, of what I think is a gradual but dramatic cultural and political change in this country. It’s also home. I grew up in the suburbs on the north side, and I’ve told my wife the winters really aren’t that bad and that, really, the Cubs could make a run this year. (Who knows?)
Covering the Charleston massacre in South Carolina — as well as simply spending time in a place as strange and backward as South Carolina, covering politics and getting into trouble — helped lead to a series of fairly depressing epiphanies about the state of America and the role of race in our society. Tom Hall understands and imparted the history to me behind the Confederate flag and the ugly history of racial politics in the South and beyond. The Rev. William Barber helped me realize that civil rights isn’t an old fight.
All of those themes converge in ways good and bad in a place like Chicago. South Carolina, as colorful and bizarre and wonderful as it can be, often felt to me like a place trapped in time, unwilling or un-wanting to confront uncomfortable problems and issues. Chicago feels like a place burdened with the legacy of a similar history but with people who, at the very least, acknowledge some of those challenges.
Encouragement from people like Jamie Kalven and John Conroy helped me realize that this city’s media landscape — like many others — has been devastated in recent years and that, while there’s still excellent journalism here, including from the institutional behemoths, there’s plenty of room and, indeed, a necessary space to find and tell the well told untold story. At the very least, I must try.
We are at a point that calls for that kind of work. Bombshells like the Laquan McDonald video help rip open the darkly-cloaked corners of the world. When it happens, sunlight begins to provide a pathway for change and understanding.
In the wake of McDonald also comes the heavy legacy of police torture in Chicago, a paramount focus of my efforts here. I do not wish to rip open those old stitches simply for the sake of it or even for history’s sake. Rather, I wish to explore the past in order to make sense of the present.
And so I will be documenting here and elsewhere efforts to delve into the past when it comes to the Chicago police and the city’s neighborhoods, to explain and explore violence and other criminal justice efforts in my new and old hometown. There will be side trips along the way when the whim strikes — I will always be drawn to narrative and the art of politics.
Have ideas? I hope you’ll get in touch at borden.jeremy@gmail.com.
This new thing here is unexpected but welcome, and it feels familiar. I’m glad to be home.
