Do I Have Twitter Brain?

Last night over at Ben's I told him that more and more I feel like I'm writing to a static box of text of arbitrary length and leaving worthwhile material in my notebooks. I find myself wanting a forum, I told him, I guess it could be a blog, let's say blogs.tampabay.com/michaelkruse, where I can tell readers what I'm working on, how I'm doing the reporting, what I'm reading, who I'm talking to, what I'm learning, all while building toward a more traditional piece that would run in the paper and on the Web site, and then linking that to the forum, too, and then finally using the forum to share any stuff that didn't make the final cut and respond to any questions or feedback prompted by the piece.

Ben put down his beer and told me that I had it wrong — that we write STORIES, bitch, and that we are the "gatekeepers," and that I had "Twitter brain."

I've had this conversation before with some other people. This was just the most recent.

I know I'm not the only one who's having these thoughts. Far from it. And I may or may not have "Twitter brain" but I don't know that that's necessarily all bad.

I want to have my reporting process at this point be way more transparent, and I want my work on a story to be a continuous dialogue more than a one-time, me-to-the-reader bullhorn. Because WHY NOT? There are all these tools available through which to deliver a constant stream of reported information, earned, acquired KNOWLEDGE, and we seldom use them. And even if we do use them here and there we still tend to devote most of our time and energy and thought to the idea of an ARTICLE that's going to run TOMORROW on 1A or 3B or whatever and is going to be 15 inches or 25 inches or whatever.

We talk about space.

We talk about SPACE!

As in: It's really tight tomorrow. There's not much space. It's gotta be 20. Not so much because that's what the story deserves. Not so much because that's what the story needs. But because that's the size of the hole we have to fill.

SPACE? In 2009?

I feel like this with almost every story I work on by now, although the ongoing Rifqa Bary story has been particularly frustrating — I feel like I know more and have more to share than what I actually end up giving the reader, and I've written NINE stories, with no end in sight.

To which Ben said last night: Who WANTS that much? Who CARES that much? Well, not everybody, obviously, but some people. Will everybody want the same level of detail or complexity? No. Of course not. But why not throw it all out there and let people drill down as deep as they want. Because they CAN. And so can we.

Just to be totally clear: I'm not saying we shouldn't still write stories. I'm not saying we shouldn't still be striving to write well-reported, well-thought-out, well-constructed, beautiful and definitive works of narrative non-fiction. All I'm saying is that to ONLY do that at this point feels … limited, and limiting.

Working, working, hoarding, hoarding, and then letting people see what you've done feels so … 2005. Why not instead build context and credibility along the way?

To which Ben replied: What a waste of time. But I'm ALREADY spending the time. Sharing what I'm learning more or less AS I'm learning it wouldn't take THAT much more time, and the benefits to the most interested readers, OUR BEST CUSTOMERS, or POTENTIAL best customers — here's even MORE — and the potential benefits to ME, too — here's what I know, the reader, and now let me share it with you, the reporter — I think would far outweigh any extra time spent.

Honestly. What else am I going to do? Go home at 5?

What do you guys think?