Reading Doug Thompson on Veterans Day

Update: Doug’s condition was listed as “good” after 20 days in the hospital, according to a page one story in the Roanoke Times on Dec.2, with a cautionary line that the term is relative, and that he is in need of much healing.

Doug Thompson, photojournalist, video producer, author of BlueRidgeMuse.com and creator of CapitolHillBlue.com was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident on Friday. I want you to meet him.

Here’s a video by Doug about the Traveling Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and his article about it: The Sound of Thunder, posted at the Roanoke Valley Harley Owner’s Group, one of many Web sites where he’s the man  behind the curtain.

I met Doug shortly after I moved to southwest Virginia, and over the years have talked with him about journalism, the Web, cameras, music and  politics in a dozen or three conversations at the Floyd Country Store or at the photo studio he used to have nearby. We usually just run into each other, but I did manage to get him to Radford to talk to my journalism students a couple of times. I was hoping to do that again this semester. I’m still hoping to do that again. For now, while he’s in the hospital, students will have to settle for exploring his work…

Here’s what his home page says about him:

“Newspaperman, writer, photographer, videographer, documentary filmmaker, political operative (briefly) and motorcyclist.
It’s hard to put a handle on Doug Thompson. He sold his first story and photographs to a newspaper at age 12, became a full-time daily newspaper reporter at 17, columnist at 19 and city editor at 25.
Today, at 64, he continues to explore the medium with pointed, often acerbic opinion pieces, photography and films.”

True enough. His last post at BlueRidgeMuse.com was about his new iPhone and the serious photojournalists creating, as his headline said, iPhotojournalism.  My students should read it, and the variety of stories on BlueRidgeMuse and below.

Friday’s accident involved a cow. A little over a year ago, Doug had a close encounter with deer in the road. He wrote about it under the headline Somebody was watching over me.  I’m hoping he recovers soon and fully… to write another “Someone was watching over…” This time it should include the irony of writing on Nov. 8 about preparing to put his bike in the shop for a 100,000-mile tuneup and titling the piece “How many miles to go before I sleep?” He also should have fun with the fact that for all his professional photojournalist credentials, his last Facebook post before the accident was a “cute cat” photo. (Cat in a motorcycle helmet and goggles.)

I didn’t know he was such a Facebook user, because Doug’s productivity on all of his own sites is so impressive: News, photos, video (especially Floyd High School sports, FloydFest  and Floyd’s old-time music scene), and politics. Here’s his most recent piece on this month’s election, in Capitol Hill Blue, a political website he pioneered in 1994: The voters have spoken, but Republicans may be too deaf to hear (Nov. 7, 2012)

Last, and only least so that folks who scan to the end will see it and read it, here’s a fine story Doug wrote about his amazing mother and her history with motorcycles. She passed away in August: A life well lived.

Thinking about the future of news, with or without newspapers

Darn… Cyber scholar and new media thinker Clay Shirky was almost in town today and I missed him… When someone who was there posts a report, I’ll link to it here. Until then, I’ll let this ramble from link to link.

As promised follow these links: Beth Macy and Carole Tarrant both shared their accounts of Shirky’s visit to The Roanoke Times, the “almost in town” I referred to above. I wish I’d been able to make it, but I was off at the doctor’s office learning how to avoid having a stroke — not entirely unrelated to this business of keeping up with a dozen new Web technologies at once.

Meanwhile, even a near-miss is a good enough excuse to post this link to a speech by “Digital First” newspaper publisher John Paton, who mentions Shirky in a recent speech gently titled “Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives.”

Paton doesn’t actually link his Web post to the article by Shirky that he mentions — not that anyone reading his speech couldn’t slap the title into Google and be there in an instant: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

I can’t help but think Paton is right about community knowledge and identification with local news, and I love his idea about the newsroom as public coffee shop… but I wonder about the extent to which the audience has to have the news habit in the first place.

Torrington, Conn., is home of his open-newsroom-coffeeshop experiment and, coincidentally, I’ve spent some time there back before the Web was spun. Back then, the two papers (Torrington Register and Winsted Citizen), apparently now merged at http://www.registercitizen.com, probably benefitted from the disappearance of The Hartford Times (RIP c. 1976) and the decline of The Hartford Courant under Tribune co. ownership since 2000. When it had The Hartford Times as well as these smaller papers to compete with, the Courant had strong bureaus in both Torrington and Winsted and stringers in all the smaller towns surrounding both cities. (I was a bureau reporter, later bureau chief, in two comparable bureaus on the other side of the state.)

For my students and colleagues in southwest Virginia: Imagine a city of 20,000 to 40,000, about the size of Radford, with FOUR competing daily papers, three of them with full-time resident reporters, plus a strong local news radio station!

Some people still living in Torrington or Willimantic, where I was a reporter, grew up with that kind of news-consumer-culture. Add a strong League-of-Women-Voters and New England Town Meeting civic culture, and whether it’s “digital first” or “print-only,” a news organization has something to tap into. (That “print-only” link goes to a recent Nieman Reports article about The Boston Courant, a small weekly that is no relation to the Hartford institution.)

How do you “grow” a civic-minded news culture or revive one that has been dormant? Before the end of the semester, I hope to get students thinking and talking about that — and this page’s links should help.

Here are a few more links for good measure: “The Washington Post — a Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered,” a New York Times piece from last week, and a Times letter to the editor by Rachel Davis Mersey, author of Can Journalism Be Saved? She apparently is almost a former classmate of mine. (I was pointed to her letter by Philip Meyer, who admits to having both of us as students, and who has just added an autobiography to his list of publications, and a Twitter feed. )

Finally, it dawned on me that I’ve written blog posts about these issues off and on over the years, so I’ve started my own “Old News” aggregation page — on the menu at the top of this blog.