These are frustrating times for nonfiction writers, between AI competition and advertising's massive shift from print to search engines, streaming, and social media. Many magazines no longer have the budget for long-form articles requiring lots of research and travel.
Nonetheless! After 44 years of nonfiction writing, and well over a hundred articles and columns, I feel lucky to have started work before the Internet. With all the research and travel needed, it kept me in student-mode throughout.
It's a time when the uber-wealthy are paying a lot for "experiential" events, like playing a bit part in a movie, hunting for treasure, or climbing Mount Everest along with a hundred others seeking that killer photo atop the summit.
Meanwhile, feature writers on a beat like mine are paid to go into places not otherwise open to the public, and report back. Over the years I was allowed into locations including these:
- To the top of a Texas radio tower under construction;
- Into a nitroglycerin factory in Missouri;
- Into the flight deck of the B-2 Stealth bomber, followed by time in the simulator that the pilots use;
- Ride on a training flight with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Night Stalkers;
- Drop into a deep tunnel under Brooklyn, to watch workers scale rock off the chamber's ceiling after a blast;
- Ride on a helicopter doing maintenance on live, high-voltage transmission lines in Pennsylvania;
- Accompany firefighters into a burning trailer;
- Go into the Ohio State Prison to interview a safecracker;
- Go into Jet Propulsion Lab at 2 am to watch a transmission to the Voyager 2 spacecraft;
- Spend days aboard an offshore drilling ship, 120 miles off Louisiana;
- Go into Cheyenne Mountain's "battle cab" command center;
- and to hear the terse command from my guide in the wreckage of the World Trade Center's Customs House: "If I say it's time to get out, just follow me!" (And good advice it was - a section we had visited collapsed a day later)
No comments:
Post a Comment