John Schwartz, writing in the New York Times today, says this:
For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.”
Actually, it was pretty easy. In fact, the very edition that carried Schwartz' story had a piece by Amy Waldman that it is a model for vivid reporting and easily surpasses some of the stuff Schwartz holds up as great blog-reportage (bloggage?).
Here's Schwartz:
At sumankumar.com, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: “Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead were dropped and the half alive were carried to safety.
Now, I love blogs. I've got one and I read dozens a day.
But read the passage from Kishore's blog above and contrast it with the following passage from Waldman's piece, which describes an Indian man's ordeal as he discovered his dead wife and then was forced to quickly bury her:
In the huge hole in the earth, Muniamma's husband, Mani Natrajan, a 35-year-old fisherman, bent over the mound that now represented his wife and draped a bright red cloth over it. He had found her less than an hour before, in the morgue at the government hospital, where a morbid sweetness cloyed the air and khaki-clad police officers wore white masks over their mouths.
Waldman's piece is terrific writing because it shows and doesn't tell. That makes it different from a lot of blog-reportage which tries to tell the reader what to think and sense. (Or worse, blogs that are long interior monologues that describes what the blogger was thinking and sensing as a situation unfolded.)
We know, even after reading this short passage from Waldman, that “it was a horrible site to see.” But Kishore and other amateur bloggers would rather tell us then do the hard work of finding and describing the details that led them to their conclusions.
Moreover, Kishore and other bloggers tells us what was happening to a group of people — “men and women, old and young” and “relief workers” — while Waldman gives us two characters — a gravedigger and a fisherman.
What reaches into your gut more? Waldman's piece does, of course, because in reporting specific details she shows us the site — even hints at how it smelled — and it easy with the details she provides to get a powerful sense of how horrible a site it is to see.
What else is great about Waldman's reportage here? The writing is active. A lot of bloggers write in a passive voice — a “Dear Diary” past tense that reduces intimacy and immediacy.
What else? Waldman, like every great reporter, lets verbs and nouns do most of the work. Weak writers fill up their paragraphs with adjectives. Even weaker writers resort to adverbs. Want to write with a powerful intimacy? Strip out every adjective and modifier and use nothing but nouns and verbs.
That way, an adjective sparingly used has much more power and meaning: “bright red cloth”, “morbid sweetness” and “white masks”.
And finally — quotes are used sparingly. In fact, she has precisely one perfect quote in the piece, well down in the piece, and it's all of seven words. Had she done what many beginning writers might do and larded the piece up with quotes from others, the quote she uses would have lost all its power. Here's Waldman again:
“He had said goodbye to her and their three children Sunday morning after dropping off some fish at their thatched shanty near the shore of his village on India's southeast coast.
He walked a few hundred yards to his boat at the nearby backwater. Soon after he heard shouts and saw people running, and then saw a wall of water taller than the trees wash over his home, then suck it and his family out to sea. He himself held onto a tree to avoid being swept away.
“Even one child I could not save,” he said.
I'm singling out Waldman but I've seen lots of great reportage like this from the world's mainstream media outlets that is easily more intimate and powerful than much of the bloggage I've read.
So keep it up bloggers — I love reading them — but there's more — much more, in fact — to being able to provide a powerful eyewitness account to an event than simply being there.
John and Jackie Knill (pictured left)of North Vancouver, B.C., Canada were last seen in in Khao Lak, Thailand. Have you seen them?