The Shape of Journalism

Maybe this is a little abstract:

Cornelia Jones' "Mass" at the Phoenix Art Museum
(Photo by yours truly)

I'll start again. My group - led by the brave and charismatic Katie - met with our mentor today at lunch. Our mentor, Rebecca Blatt, PIN Bureau Chief and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, gave a lot of good advice about structuring - or, rather, re-structuring - our pieces. At the end of our discussion, she  mentioned the need to hold all the pieces together in any good article, that strong journalistic writing is aware of its audience, whatever it it.

I'm reminded of a piece I saw at the Phoenix Art Museum this past Saturday. It's by the English artist Cornelia Jones. Her companion piece, "Anti-Matter," is at my home museum, the De Young in San Francisco. What I like most is how her piece, which is made of charred bits of wood held in plane with fishing line, appears to cohere, but only sketchily so. It has the semblance of shape without actually having shape.

That's how, I've figured out, good journalism works. My major piece, on the line between reporting and advocacy, has shown me, through the interviews and research, that the obligation is to give the facts and let the readers draw their own conclusion.

To me, those facts look like this:

“You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies” by Yayoi Kusama
(Photo by yours truly)

For those of you who don't know Kusama's work, the pieces are infinity rooms that blink on and off. The experience is unsettling, but beautiful. So should be, I think, good journalism: little points of light that the viewer, reader, or perceiver interprets on their own.

Blink, blink,

David Andrew Tow
Terra Linda High School
San Rafael, Calif.