Is Brendan Kiley A Wrong-Headed Asshole?

Over at Just Wrought, NewsWrights Producer and playwright Paul Mullin summarizes the a.WAKE.ning event we did last week. We had a short performance from The New New News and a really excellent panel discussion featuring many working journalists.

The most lively exchange of the night, as Paul writes, was between Art Thiel and Brendan Kiley (emphasis mine):

Several good friends gave me their feedback in the days after and nearly all of them specifically mentioned the earnest and well-argued exchange between Art Thiel and Brendan Kiley regarding the definition of a journalist. Is it, as Art argued, an expert in a certain field or, per Brendan, an aggressive novice? One friend clearly felt Brendan played the wrong-headed asshole in the debate; the other friend, however, remarked on how freaked out he was by what he viewed as Art’s vehement defensiveness.

As fashionable as it is to shit on Brendan Kiley, I actually want to jump in and defend him from this anonymous source.

Kiley's point wasn't exactly that the ideal journalist is an aggressive novice. His point was that the defining characteristic of a great journalist is courage, contra Thiel's contention that the defining characteristic is expertise. But, in fairness, Kiley didn't do a terrific job of articulating that idea.

It seemed to me that both Kiley and Thiel were describing a journalistic ideal through the frame of their own self-perception. Art Thiel is clearly an expert. Kiley is, by his own admission last Monday, not a trained journalist, and when engaging in long-form pieces like his recent series about tainted cocaine, not an expert either.

I actually agree with both men. My ideal journalist is a person who is both expert and courageous: people like Charlie Savage and Jane Mayer. These are the heroes that bring dark deeds to the light.

So, no, Brendan Kiley wasn't wrong. He just wasn't completely right.

From The Actors #2

We asked our actors from The New New News Staged Reading to give their thoughts on the art and process. Here's a few words from Betty Campbell. - ed.

First of all want to say thanks to NewsWrights for doing what you are doing. I am a big fan and you are dealing with ideas that really reverberate with me as vitally important: Information is power; money controls flow of information; the impact of modern technology on the creation and dissemination of information; TMI is just noise. I think it's scary.

And for you, in a process that is collaborative, to create a piece of theatre that is entertaining, that is really about important ideas, without being polemical is sure a challenge. But you're definitely on the way. What we read on the 24th (and the good comments you got from cast and audience that day) has so much great stuff in it and I don't have the kind of smarts that could really advise you how to make it better....I could see enough there to make more than one play (maybe a separate one that is about the relevance of journalism/ professor/ tenure).

Georgiana* had a good statement..."Tis a gift to be simple". I so look froward to the next iteration of The New New News.

*Georgiana was Betty's character in the staged reading; she's an elderly Seattleite whose political blog becomes suddenly and surprisingly popular.

Why I'm Excited for a.WAKE.ning

It's pretty simple -- because you'll (probably) never see these local media luminaries on a single stage ever again.

NewsWrights Producer Tom Paulson, NPR global health blogger and 20-year veteran of the Seattle P-I, will moderate a panel discussion on new media. The panel is scheduled to include Pulitzer Prize-winning P-I political cartoonist Dave Horsey, Monica Guzman of Intersect.com, Publicola's Josh Feit, local sportswriting legend Art Thiel, The Stranger theatre critic Brendan Kiley, and Chris Grygiel, coordinator of political coverage for the P-I blogs.

Toss in a free drink, snacks, live theatre, interactive media art and original commissioned visual work, and you have an epic value for your $20 ticket.

Why do we need the money? Because we're paying real wages to real actors and going on a three-location tour. It's a great event for a great company and I hope you'll join us.

From the Actors

We asked our actors from The New New News Staged Reading to give their thoughts on the art and process.  Here's a few words from Becky Chong.  - ed.

My two cents.  Hahha...they're kind of all over the place but it's just what has been percolating.

The New New News reading was quite the educational experience for me.  I am not a user on Twitter and was surprised by how these mediums of communication (Twitter, texting, Facebook, YouTube, etc) are translated into the world of journalism.  What exactly is the face of today's Journalism--and is the current technology necessarily an advantage for catapulting Journalism where it seems to be heading? 

I do feel that in many ways it takes away the artistic value of journalism.  Max's thesis on the death of journalism* (and if people will even be teaching it in the future) is very disheartening. 

Many times it feels like, for the average user, that technological advances are happening way too fast and it's hard to catch up.  I perform shows at schools and I remember one elementary school where all the students were given rental laptops for the whole year.  That generation is growing up where magazines, newspapers, paperbooks, etc are a thing of the past and digital communication is the ruler; where reality television is a normal part of life; where with a click of their fingers, and within a few seconds, they can post a video on YouTube to make something news-worthy.  

One more thing that really shook me up was that you have to ask--if you have all these people who are telling these stories--how much of what they are saying is credible?  And what exactly in The New New News is true?  I left feeling even more confused as to what the real story was and what was chopped up to make it a luring, engaging story.  What is fact and how do you trust the media regardless of what medium its being distributed.  What is NEWS when the people who are covering the stories being covered become part of the news themselves?

becks :)

*The character of Max in The New New News is a Professor of Journalism applying for tenure. - ed.

Reporting on the inside from the outside in

I got my first real look at The New New News last night. I’ve been part of the high-level talks on the project, which was inevitable given my penchant for pontificating on media issues anyway, but have had to step back from the script meetings and workshop as producer duties (read: all the paperwork Paul and Dawson hate to deal with and hired me for) have demanded my time.

So, when I sat down for last night’s reading having caught only the last five minutes of rehearsal and a few minutes of director notes, I felt very much like I was looking at this from the outside. A well-informed witness to a moment deep inside the development process, but on the outside nonetheless.

And, as I told Paul and Dawson afterwards, I was at times more compelled than I thought I would be, and at times more detached and outside the narrative than I thought I would be. Which is really perfect for this stage. All the potential is there, and we’re at the right stage to trim away anything that is preventing that potential from reaching actuality.

A brief and purposely obtuse collections of my notes from last night: found Pete the most engaging – he’s the noble “should”; Art’s guru misadvice = SEO; desire for Robot Chicken static jump-cuts disturbing; [name redacted]’s transformation is beautiful and perfect and the arc to which all other character arcs should aspire; not sure Paul has his numbers right; sometimes yet-to-be-written scenes should stay that way; Terence McKenna on X, nitrous and 72 hours of Powerpuff Girls (I think this had more to do with what I wanted to see than what I saw); failure doesn’t die to live another day.

The clearest thought I walked away with, though, was that this form, the Living Newspaper, has a place in the present day and the present conversation. Theatre and journalism are struggling and failing in such similar ways, it seems natural they might find similar solutions, and I’m putting my money on local.

Special thanks to all the actors that spent their weekend working on this piece – you did an amazing job and we can’t sufficiently show our appreciation for you volunteering your time. Thank you Holly Arsenault, Noah Benezra, John Bogar, Betty Campbell, Becky Chong, David Gehrman, Stephen Hando, Amy Love and John Q. Smith.

Hashtag for Tonight's Live-Tweeting

I'm sitting in the theatre at North Seattle Community College watching our outstanding team of actors do a readthrough. The public reading is tonight at 7:00 PM -- will you be there? It's free!

I've even created a super-sweet hashtag so that nerds and iPhonies can live-tweet their experience:

#NNNews

That's short for The New New News which is the name of the play.

See you soon!

Sitting in on a Script Meeting

Paul and Dawson invited me to sit in on their script meeting last Wednesday; they were taking the sundry pieces and scenes that the two of them had written (mostly) independently and putting them in a sensible order.

Now this wasn't the first time in history that two writers put some scenes in order, so I won't pretend like this is headline news. But this play engages Seattle's recent history and a very particular moment in the development of information technology, and our focus on new and instantaneous media raises some interesting structural questions.

About a year ago I had the pleasure of interviewing David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet over the phone. Kronos Quartet frequently collaborates with artists and musicians who work outside the traditional Western musical vocabulary. David talked about needing to invent a brand new process every time they embark on a new project.

I thought of Kronos as I watched Dawson scrawl acronymic scene titles on giant post-it notes, scratch them out, and replace them with some other piece of code as Paul decided on the fly what he is and isn't willing to cut. Tom Paulson and I had a few moments of, "You following this?" because, as artistic collaborators so often do, Paul and Dawson had developed a project-specific shared vocabulary.

"Well, yes, I agree. It's just Oscar --"
"Right. Yes, absolutely."
"I'm wondering about --"
"Right. What about the tweets?"
"Well -- hahaha."

And so on.

There's no "right" way to tell a story, and there certainly isn't a template for a project like this. There are practical considerations -- the passage of time within a story thread, for example -- and considerations on pacing and flow that will guide the audience experience. What's really special about this play is that we're studying an instantaneous form of communication while working in an ancient (and in many ways, lumbering and laborious) form of communication.

We have a staged reading coming up this weekend and we'll see if it all goes together. I for one am looking forward to seeing those giant post-its come to life.