Ethan Watters

The obvious choice, yet again, to blog on, but oh well. Y'all can enjoy my thoughts anyway.

First off, I want to take the opportunity to clarify that I really enjoyed the book. I thought it was absolutely fascinating and I like that he kind of kicked the western world off its high and mighty perch a bit, too. On the other hand, it could have been way shorter, but I somehow survived.

I'd never met the author of a book after I'd read the book before, so that was kind of a cool experience. Not that I hung on to every word, but I did take pretty copious notes. I liked that he went into detail about why he chose the topic that he did and why it interests him. I also really liked that he gave us all little nuggets of journalistic wisdom from his experience to guide us all, nuggets which I find highly valuable, actually.

I feel like at this point in our careers, everything spells DOOM. It's like journalism is shifting to the point that we professionally-trained may not even have a great place to mold our craft to be something valuable for society to partake in.

Watters didn't really console much on that, which I really liked, because I'm tired of hearing those consolations. Everything is changing, yeah, but you don't know what the future holds any more than I do, so why try to predict it? Let it be.

He instead chose to tell us HOW to pick what we want to do, which is amazing to hear since everyone keeps saying that to be a journalist these days you kind of have to be a jack of all trades, so to speak, and I'd rather not do that. I've already found those specific little niches that fascinate me in the world and have every intention of following through with discovering everything I can about those, which is exactly what Watters said to do.

I also thought that it was awesome that he told us about treating people nicely to get information out of them and then making them look bad (something I have some recent experience with, unfortunately). I really never want to do that again, and I enjoyed that he said that he wasn't okay with doing it either. I felt like I could effectively identify with that.

I liked the anecdotes. I liked the advice. I liked the 10 tips for being on the Daily Show. I liked hearing the story from the man himself. I liked attending the talk. I feel like I actually learned something, like a great little supplement to reading the book.