Appreciating those who make Earth Journal not just a column but a conversation

In this final post of 2013 I want to pause and thank the readers who have added so much to the Earth Journal enterprise this year.

Fear not, this won’t be one of those end-of-the-year mailbag jobs that some columnists do as an excuse for reprising their own prose. To rework a memorable phrase from Elmore Leonard, lost to us in August:

Don’t worry —  I’m not going to say any more about my own stuff than I have to. If that.

Nor am I about to foist a bunch of snippets from the year’s correspondence on the pretext of sharing my soapbox. What an odd anachronism that kind of column is, in a time when readers can expect their rejoinders to be published shortly after they finish composing them (or sometimes, alas, slightly before).

To those who have contributed comments to Earth Journal these past 12 months, thanks from my heart for so steadily adding your own knowledge, perspectives and passions to my scribbles. And, by doing so, turning this feature into a series of conversations ranging far beyond its departure points.

Challengers and defenders

I haven’t written much this year that made Rolf Westgard happy. Most every time I touch on some aspect of our energy systems — nuclear power, renewables, utility regulation, greenhouse gases and global warming — Rolf finds me to be seriously wrongheaded and wastes no time in saying as much.

And, Rolf, I am in your debt for that — for pushing me to think harder, for cautioning me to write more clearly, for suggesting new topics, angles and lines of inquiry.

Also, for bringing into the Comments the thoughts of so many other knowledgeable readers — Lance Groth, Ray Schoch, Neal Rovick, Paul Udstrand come quickly to mind, and there are many more  — who can be relied upon to differ with you, whether or not they completely agree with me.

I believe it’s poor practice for me to rebut the rebuttals that come my way, unless it’s to clarify or amplify some important point that just can’t wait. Which I’ve done once, maybe twice this year.

Usually, though, someone else pipes up with the rejoinder I might have made, or a better one I hadn’t thought of. Sometimes the entire back and forth concerns something I never even wrote, and that’s OK, too.

Because time after time, the wandering reader ambles into a discussion of some aspect of, say,  climate change or groundwater depletion or leaf-bagging that’s far broader and deeper than a nonexpert and highly part-time journalist like me could ever hope to produce on his own. Flush with footnotes, citations and links that lead to still more material. In a tone that, compared to much of what passes for discourse these days, retains a fundamental civility.

So, there’s plenty of room on this soapbox.

Volunteer proofreaders

Next, to a mercifully smaller cadre of readers who’ve let me know by private email about typos and other errors of haste, my private thanks for making sure that Earth Journal:

• Ascribed previous ownership of PolyMet’s Hoyt Lakes mill to LTV, not U.S. Steel.
• Located Wausau east of the Twin Cities, not west (sheesh!).
• Reversed its promotion of Fred Harding from concerned citizen to ex-mayor of Maiden Rock, Wis.
• Lowered the typical residential water bill in White Bear Lake from $27 a month to $27 a quarter.

And a few others I’m forgettting, I’m sure. You know who you are; please know that I appreciate your helping to keep me accurate.

It has been a joy to learn that so many people I’ve known from years past stop by from time to time. Some of them are Elanne Palcich, Terry Gips, Neal Gendler, Bob Moffitt, Kevin Proescholdt, Chuck Holst, Nancy Gibson, David Morris, Chris Ison, Paul Danicic, Ron Kroese, J. Drake Hamilton, Bill Hansen, Nelson French, John Marty, Michael Noble and Becky Rom.

Then there are people I’ve met only through Earth Journal, most of them virtually, including Rachel Kahler, Greg Kapphahn, Ron Way, Jon Erik Kingstad, Ellen Brown, Jody Rooney, Rachel Weisman, Connie Sullivan, Todd Reubold and Kate Knuth.

All of these people have offered helpful thoughts, encouragement or both. A month ago the last two listed, Todd and Kate, invited me to join with MPR’s Elizabeth Dunbar and TPT’s David Gillette in a training for University of Minnesota graduate students interested in knowing how to deal with news media.

The event got me to thinking about how the journalism I do now is different from what I did in my first career, which spanned a little over 30 years, was spent entirely at big-city newspapers  and coincided for the most part with an era I think history will consider American journalism’s golden age in terms of its enterprise, innovation and commitment to social purpose.

Why to love new journalism

That journalism is in steep decline, and there is much I miss about it (in addition to the compensation). But, honestly, there is much more that I prefer about this new age, beginning with email’s displacement of the fax machine and proceeding through the new craft forms developing at serious-minded but hardly somber publications like MinnPost.

I like the continuous news cycle, with its virtues of instantaneous publication, frictionless updating and occasional on-the-fly corrections.

I like the flexibility of narrative forms, in which the formerly bright line between reporting and commentary has softened, and there is room for both professional detachment and personal perspective in the same piece.

I like the opportunity to bring readers something useful not only through my own fact-gathering and interviewing but by locating and lifting to higher prominence some important work that’s been done elsewhere, amplifying or adding to it in some way, without needing to pretend I’ve re-reported everything so as to claim it as “original.” So much pack reporting is a thing of the past now, and so much phoniness, enough to make you blush.

But most of all I like the dismantling of barriers between writers over here and readers over there, in favor of a model wherein the facts and perspectives I gather become the starting point for a discussion in which I’m just one voice among many, and likely to learn as much as anyone.

For all of you who helped to make that happen over and over in 2013, many thanks again, and we’ll pick it up here in January.