And this is one terrific post on his blog at www.joshuakucera.net:
Link: Joshua Kucera: "A real tragedy and a waste".
I should say more by way of introduction, because I did help Josh get a new blog back up and running again, but when it comes to Josh, he figures everything out pretty quickly, so there wasn't much for me to do.
I'd been waiting until he hit his stride to put up a "Grand Opening" announcement link to it, but you need to read this post. The site's already deep and rich with a full stock of his research and article archives on international affairs.
It also is a terrific story research resource for generalist journalists who don't have this kind of specialist background, for when they're working on international stories.
I hosted Josh's first (and ground-breaking) Iraq warblog, The Other Side, here on serendipit-e.com in March 2003. It was a short run, but his observations from on the ground in Kurdistan easily rose to national attention in the Blogosphere and Mainstream Media, largely on the specific and reflective nature of Josh's observations.
And I'd missed his voice. Not that he wasn't still working in traditional journalism, chugging away on military and international news at Jane's Defense Weekly (and other pubs in the information group, I guess).
I know he's still working out what he wants this blog to do, and maybe figuring out how its voice fits in with all his other voices, but when I saw the post above, I knew Josh the blogger was back. It just hits me like a fist to the gut.
It's the fact that he wrestles with the stuff in this post that makes his perspective so valuable. Kevin Sites can run all over hell in Yahoo's "Hot Zone," playing "Joe International Journalism Guy" with a marketing campaign, slick design and all, but give me someone who reflects on what their position in the world means, what it intentionally and unintentionally inscribes, even while still dedicated to doing the work.
(I'm not saying Kevin doesn't do that, but you just gotta get past all the flashy stuff to dig for it. Kevin's embedded work with that one Marine unit in Iraq was nothing short of tremendous, and courageous. The photography on the Yahoo site reminds me of that early Rick Smolan CD-ROM I loved in the 1990s, Passage to Vietnam. I can't complain too much about a site that showcases photo essays as a genre).
It takes brains, heart, and reflexivity. It's a hard row to hoe, but the insights that come out of the wrestling are all the more valuable because of it, even if the ideas feel unfinished, unresolved, and maybe even resist closure altogether.
I'm far more suspicious of journalists who tie everything up in a neat little bow. In the part of the field I work in the pressure to do that with stories is intense.
Better to resist closure than to fall into stock journalism tropes, story arcs, templates of heros, anti-heros, underdogs who prevail in the end, etc. It's a lot less tidy, and you feel a lot more exposed doing it. And it isn't as easy to stick a pat marketing elevator pitch on it.
Who's questioning what's lost when bloggers start squishing themselves into look-alike slick professionally-designed sites that are really "ventures" and get all polished up with advice from "effective blogging" sites?
What my roundabout rambling means is that I'm proud to be working with Josh again, even if I did have a flashback to the old anxiety I had from worrying about him when he was in Kurdistan in 2003 and the war had just begun. Just the other day he'd sent an email that he was off to Somalia, and that same day, I went into work and the story flashed over the wires of the journalist killed in Somalia, and I was just like, "oh shit."
Go read his account of that incident, and the article in the Guardian that he cites. They need to be read together. He tells it better than I do.
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