Opinion : My first step into the world of shoeless journalism

This is a new era for me.

I have often worked at home, writing stories, or at least outlines of stories, on my computer, and then saving them on a disk to take with me to the office the next morning.

But tonight, for the first time, I will publish a story without leaving my house.

Thanks to the marvels of Internet technology, batteries and the generosity of our sponsors, Monkeytown and Radio Shack at LaGrange’s, I can now publish stories from virtually anywhere in the world.

A few weeks ago, in the first Junior Journalism class, I told my handful of young writers about the history of journalism. We discussed the need for hammers in journalism, as the Romans literally nailed the news to the posts.

Now, 2,000 years later, we still “post” things on the Internet, even though I have never seen a computer on a post.

The Greeks decided the best way to spread news was with messengers, but after what’s-his-name ran 26.something miles and dropped dead, they probably started thinking of other ways to spread the news.

Journalism went on this way about a millennium and a half, until the invention of the printing press. This allowed large numbers of papers to be printed at once. But it did not make it any easier to get the news across long distances.

Samuel Morse made that job easier in the middle of the 19th Century. Newspaper people figured out how to transmit important stories via telegraph. Civil War battle reports, and later the assassination of Abe Lincoln, reached the world this way.

But even then, there were problems. In the early days in Europe, there was a stretch of 80 miles or so that had no telegraph service. Carrier pigeons bridged the gap for a while.

The past 150 years has brought incredible changes to the news. Telephone, radio and then television gave virtually all Americans the ability to know immediately if something had happened. My parents’ generation watched JFK get elected, and then assassinated, on TV.

But even as late as the 1980s -- well for most of us, the late 1990s -- there was no way for you or I, as individuals, to share our ideas, photos or stories. We had to send our words to a newspaper, and hope they would publish them.

(Remember the 1997 movie, ‘You’ve Got Mail?” It’s all about Internet communications. But watch the movie again and you will notice something that is oddly missing from that film: Cell phones. Not one character in that movies ever uses one. Yes, times have changed that much, that fast.)

But now, virtually every person in the world with a computer costing less than a few hundred dollars can send messages to virtually every place in the world, all by himself. You can even do so with some cell phones. My computer even helps me spell my words correctly; I just noticed that “millennium” a few lines above was underlined in red by my laptop. I had left out an ‘n.’

I have said, and I still believe, that Nathaniel Hawthorne was right in the mid-19th Century, when he wrote that our communications are too cheap. I have said, and still believe, that all this technology helps those with absolutely nothing to say, to say it.

In “Walden Pond,” Hawthorne called it “musty cheese,” as he referred to people who tried to communicate their thoughts with others before taking time to think about them. And our new technology makes it so much easier, to borrow more words from Hawthorne, to sit down to write before standing up to live.

I try to honor those words in this new technology. I don’t feel compelled to put something on Vinton Today for the sake of putting something new on Vinton Today. I have had this argument with colleagues ever since we first began web sites: I have said it’s not necessary, or necessarily good, say something when there is nothing to say.

But on the other hand, I have also seen that there are things happening every day. Big things, little things, serious things, silly things. And I have learned that most of these things are worth mentioning because I can tell that many people are reading about them on Vinton Today.

Tonight, my first column written and published from home was mostly typed while I sat on the end of a couch with reclining chairs. I look forward to sitting on the porch swing at my granda’s old place, under the moon, sharing my thoughts. As a child I was well-acquainted with the old rotary phone my grandparents used, the AM radio (always set on WMT) and the TV with the giant “rabbit ears” antennae. I wonder what Grandpa Paul would say about this crazy machine that lets me send messages all over the world.

The world has changed. And now, those changes have given me an incredible opportunity for a new but similar career: Sharing stories and photos with people all over our area -- and now all over the whole wide world.

And I don’t even have to put on my shoes.