Paul Salopek: evaluation

Transcript context

…How do you think of your work as a kind of rethink of journalism or what journalism can be or should be? Yes, there’s a dichotomy here. On the one hand, the Out of Eden Walk is most definitely envisioned as a laboratory, a studio of experimentation for immersive journalism, a kind of reportage that’s been around for a long time. You can call it slow journalism, but it really is just immersive journalism, right? If you’re going to do a story about the oil industry, and you’re going to spend seven months working at a gas station in the Midwest of the United States to find out where petroleum flows are coming from around the world through that one gas station, and you’re going to dedicate yourself to it by working as a clerk at that gas station as well as getting documents to show that you can actually trace where that gasoline comes from — that, I suppose, can be called slow journalism, too, and I’ve been doing that for years. I think the Walk’s difference, though, is — as opposed to one-off projects, even weighty projects, projects that ran really deep that I could spend a year on, whatever, following a Russian gunrunner through Africa or whatnot for months and months — the difference with the Walk, and it is really a significant one, is there’s an interconnectedness between the stories that appear before me and my walking partners. They’re not atomized. They’re not happening in little boxes called environmental story, culture story, political story, economic story. These artificial constructs that journalism creates — understandably, because the world’s complicated, and part of the job is trying to make it comprehensible, and you build a frame around it. But we all know that frame is artificial or, to some degree, arbitrary because the economic story is, in fact, attached to the health story, which is attached to a conflict story, which is attached to . . . The way I’ve put it before is that you pull on one story. You tug on one story a little bit. You find that it’s connected to another story that’s connected to another story that’s connected to another story all the way over the horizon, and the Walk is a perfect instrument to show that. The interconnectedness of critical issues that face us all today in the world are highlighted and showcased when you take a journey through them, when you’re literally walking through these headlines and showing that they merge into each other. There’s no boundary. There’s no wall. There’s no white space on a page in a magazine or on a webpage. The text just smears into the next story. The Walk has been marvelous at doing that — these diagonal connections, not rectilinear ones, not X and Y axes, but something that cuts across, cuts the onion in a diagonal that shows how these stories are overlapping and touch on each other and touch on us. That’s Out of Eden Walk’s — to date — meta takeaway, the one that I share, say, with students when I talk to them about things like writing and reportage. How did your early police reporting job shape what you’re doing now? That’s a kind of slow journalism, or it can be, right?…

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