Sunday, March 11, 2007

Spring break reading #1: Life and death of a Slut Puppy And the connection to "other journalism" is...? Stay tuned. Somehow I've missed out on Carl Hiaasen's novels, despite my interest in mystery novels by newspaper reporters. Tony Hillerman's Fly on the Wall has been my favorite for years, unless you count Terry Pratchett's The Truth as "mystery" in addition to "fantasy." However, I'm only halfway through Hiasen's Basket Case, and it seems headed for my short-list. The novel's protagonist is an investigative reporter who has been reduced to writing obits for a newspaper in Florida. (Another "spring break" connection there!) He was demoted after letting his newspaper's owner know just what he thought of the gutting of the news staff to boost profit margins, making him a fine role model for journalism students. Here's the other-journalism, online-journalism irony: In one week, I stumbled on references to Hiaasen's novels in two places... The first was the expanded-for-the-Web version of a PBS interview with Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist: "I've been reading the novels of Carl Hiaasen for years now, and I'm kind of dense, but I can see even from fiction that investigative reporting is maybe the essence of journalism and what you need badly to preserve a democracy. That's really important. I'm fumbling around trying to help that, but there are people like Jay Rosen who are doing the heavy lifting trying to preserve that. There are the folks at the Sunlight Foundation; they're doing heavy lifting. The Center for Public Integrity, same thing." The other Basket Case reference I ran into was in a three-year-old blog item by Sun Microsystems' Tim Bray, headed "Carl Hiaasen and Meta-Journalism," essentially agreeing with Newmark. Bray says: "What got me thinking was Hiaasen's passionate rhetoric in Basket Case on the continuing value and importance of journalism; in particular investigative journalism... His arguments are good and convincing and I'm not going to reproduce them, but maybe they provide the answer to the a question that's been troubling a few people recently: 'why do we need newspapers and magazines any more?'" Bray says bloggers are better at reporting "real-time news," but that investigative reporting is different, requiring more time and resources than the average blogger can provide, "since you don't very often actually catch the mayor and the property developer in the act of swapping cash for permits..." As a card-carrying member of IRE, I agree wholeheartedly. But what about the dead "Slut Puppy" in my headline? Basket Case starts with the death of the lead singer for Jimmy and the Slut Puppies... and "Basket Case" is the title of one of the deceased singer's hits. In fact, Hiaasen got together with Warren Zevon to actually write and record the "title song" in 2002. More about the song and story -- and maybe a downloadable mp3 -- are on Hiaasen's own frequently asked questions page, where he also mentions that his own 25-year newspaper career somehow skipped the obit beat. Anyhow, in just a few Basket Case chapters, Hiaasen already has me convinced that he's an exception to the old saying that inside every newspaper reporter lurks a novel that should never see the light of day. So Basket Case has jumped to the top of my Spring Break reading list. Just to add to the atmosphere, I'll probably finish it on a plane to Florida. And, no, I'm not auditioning for the next "Greybearded Guys Gone Wild" video. Another Southwest Florida coincidence: I bookmarked Melissa Worden's Xdegree blog a while ago without noticing that her home base is the Sarasota Herald Tribune. (Since her blog is subtitled "exploring and redefining multimedia storytelling," I probably followed a link there from Mindy McAdams, another Floridian.) 12:50:52 PM    comment []

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