EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT JOURNALISM I LEARNED FROM HUNTER S. THOMPSON

It’s true. In 1979, I devoured Thompson’s classic Hell’s Angels and the intense journalism collection, The Great Shark Hunt. Of Shark Hunt, the Washington Post praised:

In addition to being a testament to the undeniably beatifying properties of American excess–literary, political, chemical, you name it–Hunter Thompson is the high priest of the ad hominem attack. Anyone unlucky enough to get in the way of his satirical sledgehammer will end up with soup for brains. Still, even Thompson needs a good villain to get properly lathered up; that’s why he peaked simultaneously with America’s 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon. Tricky Dick was Thompson’s dark-jowled, pale-calved Muse, and with his departure Thompson seemed to lose his place a bit. Swatting flies with a baseball bat.

Of course, aping Thompson’s journalistic style set me up for a journalistic career with a limited path for publication. Journalism with a first-person voice is not always an easy sell unless the narrator is considered an expert on the subject at hand. Eventually I relied on my J school knowledge and broadened my market to the drone-like world of trade journalism but I’m pretty much through with that. I just started writing book reviews for Pop Matters and there’s a lot of room for Thompson-esque writing in that market.

Anyway, I’m straying from the point because it’s Sunday evening, there’s Phillip Glass on the radio, and I’m stupid from pain pills as I write this. Or was it that something I smoked in that pipe? Probably a combination of both. Okay, so there’s a terrific article by Ruthe Stein in the April 20 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle about a new documentary on Dr. Gonzo:

It somehow seems appropriate to end a 15-day marathon of 105 movies and special programs with a tribute to this occasional San Franciscan and master of gonzo journalism. He came up with “gonzo” to describe his freestyle, drugs- and booze-fueled writing found in books such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72.” Chunks of both were composed in the Bay Area. While Thompson’s home was in Woody Creek, Colo., his heart and soul were in San Francisco.

This was his kind of town, and he was witness to events that became part of the city and all of Northern California’s tapestry. Thompson was the caretaker of the Big Sur Hot Springs in 1961, right before it became Esalen. He moved to the Haight-Ashbury in the mid-1960s, arriving just as hippies were settling in. He became a familiar, boisterous figure at local watering holes for years while churning out lengthy pieces for Rolling Stone and other publications.

AND SPEAKING OF JOURNALISM …
Joseph Mailander writes about judging a high school journalism contest and wistfully recalls the heady days of the Los Angeles Times:

 When I was in college, my father even used to include the newspapers of the past week in my care packages. And I’m glad he did, because I got to follow most memorably writings on local architecture, and it was a key time in LA for developments such as the Pacific Design Center and also megastructure downtown. And Sunday without the New York Times was unthinkable.

AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE “CITIZEN JOURNALISTS”?

Okay, before anyone starts hurling rocks at me, I genuinely like the folks at Metroblogging L.A.; in fact, BLA hosts two of my favorite local bloggers, Will Campbell and David Markland. But I have a real problem with the Metroblogging slogan TAKE BACK YOUR LOCAL MEDIA. Let’s start with a quote from this posting by Jason Burns (who does a fantastic Archiving Angeles series) from April 18:

There has been much criticism of late regarding one of the world’s most venerable news institutions. A sale, a few firings, a revolving door of editors. Ever since the term new media was coined, “professional” journalists and corporate new outlets have chuckled at the competition known as the blog. Bloggers are not journalists. They are not media. They are not people. Newspapers are the news. They are the ones who deliver the cold hard facts of the day – unless it’s a story on Tupac. Whoops.

Fine. But if BLA is the standard by which we are defining citizen journalists — I despise that phrase — and the concept of “taking back the local media” then we’ve got a long way to go. Just look at a sampling of some of the stories that BLA is breaking for you:

A guy flashing his tattoo (April 18); a petition against a new city law requiring taco trucks to move on after one hour (April 18); A Grilled Cheese Invitational Cook-Off (April 17); Ruth writes about the sewers being cleaned out (what an apt unintentional metaphor) in her Silverlake neighborhood (April 17); and Travis pokes fun at functionally illiterate restaurant workers. I could go on and on but I think the point speaks for itself.

AND LASTLY …

The secret words of the week are spooky flute. If you hear anyone say “spooky flute” this week you have to give them one hundred dollars. Or buy them lunch. Whichever is most convenient.

Previously: Book Club, Anyone?