One of the standout sessions from that year was a workshop called “Mobile Journalism: Embracing the MoJo’s Backpack.” It was taught by the then editor of IndyStar.com, whose name I now forget, and it covered every emerging trend for the modern day journalist, including video, photography, audio editing, and writing/reporting/producing on the fly, all out of a trusty backpack. The presenter highlighted Kevin Sites, the standout video journalist hired by Yahoo News in 2005 to report from war zones around the world, almost always by himself. Sites relied on his toolkit (see: backpack) to cover some of the most important stories of this decade, and he did it better alone than most do with a team. Considered by many to be the “granddaddy” of backpack journlists, Sites pretty much set the bar for a new age of reporters.

I left that session confident, because by that time I had already started backpack reporting, not because of the cool titles associated with it, but out of necessity. As a reporter and multimedia producer/editor at The Lantern, I started carrying a high-quality audio recorder in my backpack at all times, along with my camera, a notebook and, of course, pens. You never knew when an irate preacher would be proselytizing on the Oval, or when a random bum would bust out into a rap.  I was unwittingly doing what would become required of most journalists in the coming years, and it was reassuring to know I had a head start. Given the economics of today’s newsroom, reporters can’t just focus on reporting and writing: now, every reporter needs to be a photographer, videographer and producer. In short- a multimedia storyteller.

Since my days in Columbus, I’ve upgraded and added to my toolkit, and gathered some other useful skills along the way. I’m really interested in seeing what other journalists use in their work, and I’ve become a bit of a tech geek while trying to round out my kit. Here’s a photo of what’s in my backpack, at all times.

In this picture, clockwise from the top left corner, are:

• Nikon D3000 – DSLR camera with a 18-55mm kit lens, a 35mm prime lens, and a 55-200mm zoom lens. The D3000 is on the bottom of the Nikon DSLR scale, but it’s a nice camera, and is quite a few steps above a normal ‘point-and-shoot’ camera. For most assignments, I use the kit lens that’s attached to the body in the picture, because it can go from a wide-angle perspective to a decent zoom easily.
• 1000HA Eee PC – Asus netbook that functions as my primary word processor and photo editor. I also store a small amount of photos on this netbook, but most of my images are on an external hard drive that I keep at my office. This computer is cheap, efficient and, best of all, light, which cuts down on backpack weight and makes lugging it around almost unnoticeable. It does everything I need it to do, except edit video, which I’ll get to in a few more bullets.
• Firewire Cable – For transferring video to a computer.
• Pen and pad – No explanation needed, hopefully.
• Sony Audio Recorder – I use this for longer interviews and for personal notes while doing research. This is an indispensable tool for any journalist. You should have one.
• Panasonic PS-VG120 – 3CCD video camera. This camera is a bit outdated by now (2005) but gets the job done. Because of the size of video files, I can’t edit video on my netbook, which is my only limitation with shooting video. I’m able to transfer and edit video at both of my workplaces: at Wilmington College, and at the Wilmington News Journal. This video camera could be better, but…for what I need, it works fine.
• Smart Phone – Again, no explanation needed. Smart phones enable you to send email, search the Internet, and take photos and video if needed. With the proliferation of smart phones, the Average Joe has the potential to become a citizen journalist. Every news gathering organization worth its weight in salt encourages citizen news input. If they’re not, they will be.

What I’m missing:

• External microphone for video camera.
• A MacBook, for better video and photo workflow.
• Professional audio-recorder, the kind radio journalists employ. I miss the one I would lug around at The Lantern.

There are a number of other small items that I use that I didn’t bother to include in the picture, though they are just as important. They include spare batteries, battery chargers, memory cards, miniDV tapes, USB cables, camera lens filters, extra notebooks and pens, et cetera. I also have a ‘point-and-shoot’ camera that records some surprisingly decent video in a pinch. I used that to take the picture.

In all, my backpack weighs about 25 lbs. and, housed in a nice Columbia daypack, isn’t cumbersome at all to carry.

Are you a Mobile Journalist? What do you have in your kit?

Everything else– the content, the links, the nature of the posts– will stay the same. Same stuff, different package.

I hope you like it.

I started reading this book a few days ago, after months of telling myself “You should really read that book.” I guess it just took seeing it in a local bookstore when I had some dispensable cash in my pocket.

While I’m quite the fan of armchair adventure reading, this books seems to inspire me to go out and actually run, too. Excellent, especially considering this weekend marks the beginning of a 12 week weight loss challenge at the local YMCA. Team Moonbounce is wholly expecting to take home some hardware, if not some ill-fitting jeans. Aww yeah.

Expect an actual review of Born to Run in a week or so.

For some time now, I’ve been a fan of Jon Krakauer and his adventure writing.

In Into the Wild, he chronicled the mishaps of Christopher McCandless and his fatal foray into the Alaskan wilderness. (That book received more acclaim after Sean Penn made it the subject of his 2007 film of the same title.) In 1997 he became a household name with the success of Into Thin Air, his first person account of the doomed 1996 Everest expedition which claimed the lives of eight climbers and nearly killed Krakauer himself. Even his lesser-known works, like Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of Mormonism alongside a narrative of a religion-influenced murder, and Eiger Dreams, a collection of mountaineering essays, are great and engaging reads.

Indeed, the one common thread connecting most of Krakauer’s writing has been the mingling of man and nature, and the dominance of the latter over the former. It’s this theme that keeps me coming back to him. So I was more than a little disappointed to learn that the topic of his most recent book, Where Men Win Glory, was to be Pat Tillman.

Prior to reading this book, I admit I knew little more about Tillman than the average person, which is: NFL star joins the Army after 9/11, dies by friendly-fire in Afghanistan, covered up and used as a pawn by the Bush Administration to trumpet the ‘Global War on Terror,’ becomes national scandal. But therein lay my reservation: none of that stuff seemed to jive with Krakauer’s interests or his previous writing themes. I see now, though, why I was wrong.

Krakauer the person has some common recurring interests in his writings, like mountaineering, pushing the proverbial envelope and the outdoors in general. Krakauer the writer, though, is first and foremost a journalist. He does remarkably well in crafting a history from interviews, past media coverage and his own personal experience. And the story of Pat Tillman, from his ascendance to the top of the National Football League to his selfless decision to serve in the United States armed forces, is quite the story to tell. Place that story in the quagmire that is the war in Afghanistan, which has long been mired in half-truths and uncertainties, and the broader narrative of Where Men Win Glory becomes full developed and rich in detail.

The Krakauer / Tillman connection goes even further than merely Author / Subject. Tillman was known to be an avid reader of Krakauer, and his parents told the author that a copy of Eiger Dreams was found in his backpack shortly after he was killed.

Krakauer has said many times that this book was the hardest he’s ever written, and twice considered scrapping it entirely. In a Sept. 2009 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Krakauer explained the difficulty and the writing process in general:

Dealing with the Army, trying to make sense of thousands of pages of redacted documents, it was…as you probably know, I canceled the book at one point.  It came out a year late, but it was time really well spent. I needed more time. When I first told my editor that I was canceling it, I’m not your basic neurotic author, I don’t have to have my hand held. I deliver on time, I don’t freak out. But I freaked out! And they told me to calm down and take a deep breath. I didn’t want the pressure, I just wanted to stop. I had this bad feeling that if I didn’t stop, it was going to come out in a form I wasn’t happy with

When I start any book, I have no idea what I’m going to do. I went to Afghanistan not really knowing. And when I started Under the Banner of Heaven, it started out as something quite different, too. I go with what the material gives me. I don’t try to impose a narrative on it. With Under the Banner of Heaven, I took a lot of s— from people who just wanted a true crime story. I didn’t give them that. And it’s like, that’s fine. I’m sorry that people got the wrong impression, but the reason I don’t write for magazines any more is I love focusing on one thing for years and being able to tell this story as completely as I think it needs to be told, including all of these digressions. I’m sure the book would be more marketable and more popular if it was more straightforward, but that’s not what I do. Heaven, for me, is one focused project — it’s like a weird form of autism. And if it pans out, you get the royalties and you get to write the next one. And if it doesn’t, you don’t. I’ve had a lot of crappy jobs, but on of my favorites was working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska. What I loved about it was, you got paid for what you caught.

I’m not quite finished with the book yet (still a hundred or so pages to go, out of 500), but it’s already one of my favorites of Krakauer’s. I’ve come to realize that he is at his best not when the theme aligns with his interests, but when there is a complex and intriguing human story to be told. Pat Tillman, died April 22, 2004, fits that description better than most people, and we are worse off for having lost him.