charlie o'brien

I have continually regretted the animus between traditional journalists and bloggers. I think both sides have become increasingly entrenched in their partially accurate complaints about each other and I do not think the public, the press or bloggers are served by the standoff.

These are not new thoughts for me. But they came recently when Scoble reported on a cultural bump he experienced during his talk at Fortune magazine's Brainstorm Conference. Scoble wrote, "The audience cheered when the host made the point that magazine journalists go slower to 'get it right'" than do bloggers.

The cheering audience was comprised of many senior executives. One ironic twist is that many working reporters were relegated to an overflow room where they watched the conference onscreen but could only have conversations with each other. The cheering to me showed that the short-sightedness of big media executives regarding social media has remained consistent even as that shortsightedness has helped such media executives steer the organization closer to the edge of economic precipice.

But look at Scoble's readers did the same. In the form of comments to his post, he was cheered as heartily by his audience as the Brainstorm speaker had received. We have two groups cheering their own points of view, wanting to be proved right while no one is listening to the other side.

Hard for progress to come out of the situation, I would say. There are  two camps sitting smugly with arms folded, both sides look  "dead right" to an impartial observer, I would guess. That impartial observer would note that the world will not be a better place if traditional media organizations continue to shrivel and die. The observer would note that evidence is very sparse that a loosely joined citizen journalist network is in position to replace professional news gathering organizations. Further I believe quite passionately that the world will not be a better place without professional news gathering organizations.

Let's look at this "journalist" word. It is my view that a journalist is not defined by WHERE he or she writes but by WHAT he or she writes. Not everyone who blogs is a journalist. In fact few are. Nor is everyone who writes for traditional media a journalist either. It seems to me that crap is fairly evenly distributed between social and traditional media contributors. So is quality.

Journalism is not, however, what has put trad media companies into their generally dire straights. That is caused by an expensive, slow, environmentally hostile distribution system. News organizations are starting to resolve this by migrating online.

But a great many are missing an essential point when they go online and that is the power of conversations to engage readers and improve content. it is in the non-acceptance of the fact that the readers are collectively smarter than the writers and this is why so many bloggers such as the unedited Scoble, are building vast and loyal audiences.

But bloggers have their own stack of flaws and the stack is not small. First, we  tend to sit and opine, rather than go out and ask. We tend to assume or friends have a greater hold on truth then strangers or adversaries. Very often, we make nasty comments based on conjecture, rather than actually asking someone a tough question.

Scoble raises the issue of editors. He talks about the pain of the process he goes through writing a column for FastCompany, a slow and painful process. He talks about how our readers make our facts straight post publication.

But editors do a great deal more than fact checking. More often than not, they get reporters to write better stories. The public gets served by editors who ask annoyingly tough questions, who force reporters to go back and ask a second source for confirmation. The editorial process makes it more likely that a reader will see a more complete and credible story and despite all the examples of exceptions to this rule, the evidence that this is true is overwhelming.

I owe a lifetime of valuable lesson to editors I have known. Each of them has annoyed me, but as a rookie, Jack Cook taught me to ask the easy questions first, to make an interviewee relax. My mentor, Charlie O'Brien taught me to read the facts of a scene before letting anyone confuse me with words. Faith Wempen made Naked Conversations a better book by making it far more readable than Scoble and I could have done with her.

Bloggers form a loosely joined global network. We can spread words faster than media organizations. We usually get it right. But we usually depend on other people to fill in relevant details we did not even try to get. Collectively, we cannot match the discipline and organization of professional organizations like the NY Times, nor should we aspire to do so. Most of us lack the schooling and the training and the years required. Most of us find it easier to sit and opine rather than go out and uncover.

But we also have our assets. Some could prove hugely valuable to news organizations. For one thing, we are increasingly ubiquitous. Our feet beat the streets of the world. We feel the tremors when earthquakes erupt in  San Francisco or China. We ride London subway tubes when an explosion goes off in an adjoining car. We find ourselves lulling on a Thai beach when an tsunami rolls in with vicious force. We are increasingly present where the action is and traditional media all too often is not.

Our ubiquity is a power and that power is increasing about as rapidly as resource constraints  th lessen the reach of editorial networks; lessen their ability to get to the action; lessen their ability to dig around the proclamations of self-serving official spokespeople to report a conflicting perspective.

Blogger ubiquity comes at a time, when editorial budget constraints are disbanding historic stringer networks upon whom newspapers have depended upon for so long.  My belief is that a significant portion of this problem can be fixed by braiding traditional and new media journalism.

I also see in braided journalism an opportunity to pull back the lost revenue from local advertising that has continued ever since Craig published his first List. Bloggers can make hyper-local coverage  work better. Let's go back to that soccer game. Let's make one of those moms in the stands a blogger who covers the soccer league for a few dozen friends and neighbors.

Now, let's braid her content into the online edition of the local newspaper and let her soccer coverage be sponsored by a few local merchants who pay about a buck per click through. Or bloggers gains circulation and credibility. The newspaper gets to cover the sort of news that actually makes up hometown communities. The local merchant, for low cost gets to show community support. The paper makes some revenue and tosses a small portion to the blogger.

One example, but think of all the places and ways that braided journalism can occur.

I think this is vitally important. The world will not be a better place if traditional media keeps shriveling and dying as it has been doing in recent years. And bloggers who aspire to be journalists, will learn the difference between writing and reporting as they begin to read the facts of the scene.

My best friend, Charlie O'Brien would have been 67 today, except for the fact that he died nearly four years ago. This is what I said at his memorial service. I post this on his birthday each year, not to lament my loss but to share the beauty of our friendship.   Charlie was my mentor as a writer and I know that this year he would have been proud of me because of Naked Conversations.

"Finally, I have the last word. After 37 years, I’m free of O’Brien’s editing. He can’t hammer me with a: “Jesus Christ, Israel, just cut to the bloody chase.” No more will Charlie tell me to move a graph up here, make a chop there. When I’m done speaking today, he doesn’t get his chance to turn to you and say: “What really happened was …”

Charlie would have enjoyed today. To him, family and friends were as good as it got. Can’t you just picture him sitting here, listening-- shaking his head side-to-side, tugging a beer, toking a cigar waiting his turn, saying a paucity of words, both wise and irreverent.

I wish this were a roast, but it is not.

For nearly 40 years, Charlie O’Brien and I laughed together, often at the expense of one of us or the other. Jousting was essential to our relationship almost to the end. So was humor. Hiking three years ago at Tahoe, we sat drying on a rock after he had guided us into a snow drift. Earlier, he had demanded that I accept he was going to die which was tough. As we sat there, I asked him if he had any wisdom to impart--something he now saw that he had understood before... Some pearl to leave behind.”

He thought for a moment. “I might have been wrong about the vitamins,” he said with the straightest of faces, then he gazed pensively out at the Lake. Charlie, over the years, had fanatically consumed entire alphabets of Vitamin pills, using a vile protein concoction as his chaser.

Three years later, I would be sitting on a barstool next to Charlie for the last time. Cancer and antibiotics had reduced him to sipping soft drinks through straws. By contrast, I was downing his favorite droughts at a steady pace. There was a chance, he told me, that he’d be taking medical marijuana pills. The juxtaposition of preferred recreational substances would become our last good laugh. He would die three weeks later in the company of people who loved him.

I cannot believe he’s really gone. I expect to see him at any minute. I picture him packing for yet another trip. Charlie loved to travel.

Our travels together began in 1968 with a hike up a New Hampshire mountain. Of course we got lost and I swear it was his fault. Over the years we probably took more than 40 trips together, many on extended Thanksgiving weekends.

There were three rules for the annual trips:
(1) Adventure had to be expected.
(2) It had to be cheap.
(3) Neither of us could have done it before.

Cheap fell away first. Then, we repeated a few destinations, but the experiences were always different.

We did amazing things.

We hiked the Grand Canyon, when I was 50 and he was 55, in a single day. We dived in the Seychelle Sea Caves in Mazatland’s Mayan Jungle, meeting locals who lived in thatched huts and communicated by cell phones. We kayaked to a dessert island on the Sea of Cortez where a monsoon marooned us for three days. We snuck into Cuba and spent two unsuccessful days searching for an authentic Cohiba Cigar staying in a hotel once owned by the Chicago mob. We visited Death Valley, where Charlie duped me into watching a ‘pantomime ballet performed by a 75-year-old pot-bellied hag dancing to a wind-up Victrola. We laughed so hard we had to pee.

Sailing to Catalina Island on "Manana," the boat we owned together—actually the stern still said “Kewtie Pie-- with a K” because we always planned to paint it Manana-- we hit a storm and I snarled the jib. We would have motored in but Charlie had bought another cheap battery that died. Ten-foot waves were breaking across our aft and we were losing our heading. Charlie shrugged and said it was a fine day to die, but it turned out to be a better one to live.

One time, were drinking in an Ensinada dance hall, where locals paid ten pesetas to fox trot with Indian women and Charlie almost had be convinced I really wanted to eat the worm, when Federales with machine guns suddenly appeared, lining up everyone up against the wall for a search except for the two gringos at the bar who thought it wisest not to mention that bad guys had ducked into the woman's room and crawled out the window.

The last moment of the last night of most jaunts were usually savored on some hotel balcony overlooking outrageous beauty. We’d share cigars, cognac, philosophy and humor. “Great trip,” Charlie would conclude--then fall asleep in his chair with drink in hand. Our next trip would have followed the Civil War from Gettysburg to Shiloh when cancer shattered our tradition.

Charlie’s versions of these stories and mine were almost always at odds. It doesn’t matter whose were more accurate. Often, we were both too loaded to know. We shared huge chunks of life together. They were among the best of my life.

I met O’Brien in 1967 at the Quincy Patriot Ledger’s Norwood Office. He was an editor and I a reporter. I applied to be his #2. Everyone thought I was the worst possible choice, and they were probably right. But Charlie swung the bat for me and I got the job. We sat facing each other from midnight to dawn, five nights a week for nearly four years. We got to know each other in eight-hour doses. He was my boss but became my friend and eventually the best friend I would ever have.

We were adventure companions and sailing buddies. As roommates for two years we were the oddest of couples. He was my mentor and surrogate big brother. Our adventures nearly killed us a couple of times. We almost got arrested or into a brawl in seedy, sometimes foreign places. We laughed lots and argued a fair amount. He understood who I was but liked me anyhow.

He was always calm--even facing death. Most perils, he described as “a bit hairy.” He called cancer the luck of the draw.

He gave me the two things I need most—encouragement and shit. He gave a lot of people encouragement. He saved the shit for a select few of us. His encouragement pointed me toward the top and his shit stopped me from going over it.

Charlie taught me about life and living; about death and acceptance. He taught me ethics without preaching, about tolerance without suffering assholes and about patience even if I wouldn’t get to the bloody point.

Charlie usually put his focus on other people. He was always non-assuming. I never knew him to break a confidence. He contrived little custom rituals with people he liked. He became my wife Paula’s cooking assistant, where he gave her sage advice on children and her husband. He very rarely lost his temper except once when Paula hid his liquor on a camping trip.

Charlie was actually a very simple person. He didn’t change that much in the years I knew him. In the end, he just wanted to have more good days than bad and the good days were often defined by who he spent them with. He enjoyed reading or hearing “a good yarn.” He cultivated a hard-ass image but everyone knew he was a softie.

He had disdain for self-important people, Republicans and hypocrites. He didn’t usually trust people in uniform, expect Park Rangers. (Brother John, a Boston cop didn’t count ‘cause he never wore the damned thing.) He was a committed atheist. He usually had a buck for the panhandler. He read voluminously and very slowly. He preferred fact to fiction. Three favorite books were: “Memoirs of US Grant,” “Into Thin Air” and “Undaunted Courage.” The only thing I ever heard him call inspiring was “Tuesdays with Maury.” He almost never lied and was consistently objective and logical. He almost always drove too fast.

Above everything, he valued his family and friends, even more so at the end.

Charlie considered himself a better editor than writer. Yet, he authored a truly unforgettable work: “Health Updates,” which we received by email. It broke newspaper rules by burying hard news inside little good news sandwiches. In the middle graph we’d find telltale words like “inoperable” or “a mild discomfort in the lower jaw.” As the author warned, Health Updates would end sadly. Before it did, we learned about courage, strength, reality and that justice has nothing to do with it.

I last visited Charlie two weeks before he died. I stayed for only a few minutes because he was clearly suffering. There just weren’t enough good days left.

I miss him terribly. I’d give anything if he could tell me now to tighten and rearrange these few paragraphs. I still see him shaking his head from side-to-side, saying: “Jesus Christ, Israel—would you just cut to the bloody chase?

I’d even give him the last word."