My garage-cleaning project continues to be a tomorrow thing. To ease my guilt a bit, I am tapping a sure-fire procrastinator’s trick: Do some other thing that sort of needs to be done while you’re avoiding that thing that really needs to be done. Fifty years of writing angst have proved a pretty good way to keep my floors scrubbed and laundry folded. Some days, I even get to windows.
In this case, the thing I’m doing instead of cleaning the garage is to tackle a related mess, which are the neglected stories and links in my SAVE file. Some are as dated as the yellowed clips stuffed into boxes in my garage. Some are poignant reminders of time and place, like those jeans I’ll never get back into. But some yield little treasures — stories I tucked away to teach from or essays that offered a bit of inspiration when I needed it.
Taking a cue from another part of my domestic life, which is the BuyNothing movement, I’m passing a few of those things along here, hoping they will find a new use.
Remembering the mission
This isn’t a big-box haul to Goodwill, but a dribble of select items. I’ll start with snippets of wisdom from Cristian Lupsa, founder and editor of DoR Magazine and the Power of Storytelling Conference in Romania. The magazine folded after 13 years because of the same challenges facing news organizations around the world. The conference was suspended during COVID, but a reunion edition is planned for spring 2025. Lupsa stays deeply involved in journalism, with a growing passion for how we can align our mission even more closely with public service and solutions in today’s fractured world. You can follow his explorations and wisdom on “Draft Four” on Substack. For now, two quick moments:
Lupsa has found himself discouraged by the state of journalism and civic incivility. On May 19, Lupsa wrote about “diminishers” vs “illuminators,” and the danger of anger as a journalistic motivation:
The majority (of people) don’t trust journalists, not because they don’t trust their information – but because they don’t even trust their intentions.
Less than a month later, on June 9, he tapped a bit of an antidote. He had attended the awards ceremony for the 2024 European Press Prize, which he helped judge for two years. He included links to some of the winners and a few other favorite stories. He acknowledge that the subject of many of the winning entries provide ample reason to be angry at the state of the world, and again advocated for a journalism of caring. He also echoed something I’ve always felt after plowing through piles and piles of contest entries, which remind me that, as disheartening as the story subjects are, the service to mission hasn’t faltered:
Every time we feel down about the state of journalism, reading the best of it out there is a cure.
PS: On saving your clips
It’s dangerous to assume your digital clips will survive forever, no matter how or where they’re stored. Nieman Lab recently wrote about the history that is lost when journalistic archives are lost. Many journalists, aware of that risk, are scrambling on their own to save their work. I did my own such scramble eight years ago, when I tried to track my old clips through 20 years and five newsrooms.
