LettersFromFlyoverCountry
Well Known Member
The boss at work has asked me to do a "brown bag" lunch discussion today about my airplane project. This is a group of hardened newspeople and airplane building generally isn't the subject of "brown bags." So I'm not exactly sure why he wants me to do this and I'm pretty sure not many people will attend. But I want to do the topic justice so I've been up most of the night working on the presentation.
Halfway through the night, it occurred to me that there really is a newsroom application for the topic, although I didn't discover it until the sun was well up this morning.
It was this article I wrote five years ago and forgot about, Where Does My Airplane Come From, Daddy , which chronicled my journey of discovery in the airplane project in which it went from one role -- an assembly/engineering project -- to an entirely different (and to my way of thinking, more important) role.
The project was about people -- people I met while doing it, people who helped, people who inspired, people who gave a ****. The chances are: you fit into one of those categories.
In that picture I posted the other day of the first flight with my wife and I watching our plane, that's what I was thinking about (after thinking of those crappy rivets I bucked in the HS 11 years ago). People.
What's the newsroom message here? In public radio, we like to talk about how we cover "issues." In the course of the building project, I stopped covering "issues," and started covering people instead; people who were somehow living those "issues." Everyone has a story and those individual stories -- and those journeys -- are a way more interesting way to have a discussion about the big picture. The little picture is where the humanity is located.
Kids often look at our planes and ask "what makes them fly," and we respond with a discussion physics. The short answer is "people."
Halfway through the night, it occurred to me that there really is a newsroom application for the topic, although I didn't discover it until the sun was well up this morning.
It was this article I wrote five years ago and forgot about, Where Does My Airplane Come From, Daddy , which chronicled my journey of discovery in the airplane project in which it went from one role -- an assembly/engineering project -- to an entirely different (and to my way of thinking, more important) role.
The project was about people -- people I met while doing it, people who helped, people who inspired, people who gave a ****. The chances are: you fit into one of those categories.
In that picture I posted the other day of the first flight with my wife and I watching our plane, that's what I was thinking about (after thinking of those crappy rivets I bucked in the HS 11 years ago). People.
What's the newsroom message here? In public radio, we like to talk about how we cover "issues." In the course of the building project, I stopped covering "issues," and started covering people instead; people who were somehow living those "issues." Everyone has a story and those individual stories -- and those journeys -- are a way more interesting way to have a discussion about the big picture. The little picture is where the humanity is located.
Kids often look at our planes and ask "what makes them fly," and we respond with a discussion physics. The short answer is "people."