Monday Memo

RIP James Bellows: With Mr. Bellows's support, Mr. Felker, who died last year, embraced the use of novelistic techniques to give reporting new layers of emotional depth. New Journalism's admirers — and there were detractors — believed that it presented the news more truthfully than traditional objective reporting.

RIP Antoinette K-Doe: The first Baby Dolls showed up early Tuesday at Ernie K-Doe's Mother-in-Law Lounge in New Orleans, ready for Mardi Gras. Outfitted in satin bonnets and outlandish Baby Snooks dresses, the platoon of undeniably adult women had turned up to meet their leader, Antoinette K-Doe, for a march up Claiborne Avenue and back to the lounge for a day of full-tilt celebrating.

But, escorted by the skeletons of the North Side Skull and Bones Gang, they had to march without her.

Andy Isaacson: SOMEWHERE on the west side of Illinois, the Amish men broke out a deck of Skip-Bo cards and I joined them as the cafe car attendant, using an iPod and a set of portable speakers, broadcast Eckhart Tolle, author of "A New Earth," discoursing on the virtues of stillness.

"Life gets discombobulating," the attendant said, calmly. "This helps."

On both sides of the train window, American scenery unfolded. A dirty layer of ice and snow subdued the still cropland to the distant horizon. At the next table a woman stuck her nose in a novel; a college kid pecked at a laptop. Overlaying all this, a soundtrack: choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k-choo-k — the metronomic rhythm of an Amtrak train rolling down the line to California, a sound that called to mind an old camera reel moving frames of images along a linear track, telling a story.

Michael Brick: BRACKETTVILLE, Tex. — Favorable rattlesnake weather calls for temperatures in the high 70s, with a gentle southerly breeze to float chaparral kisses deep into the tableland of the Balcones Escarpment. Blessed with such conditions on a weekday in late February, Eric Carl Timaeus loaded an assortment of wood crates, canvas sacks and hooked poles into his pickup truck, where a black rosary swung from the rearview mirror, and set off past miles of caliche pits and Border Patrol checkpoints into the short-grass country.

And Gawker hires John Cook, who seems to think it's either 5,000 words and six weeks to publish, or instant blogging and seeing what turns up:

Mr. Cook said that Gawker will pick up the slack from fading newspapers and magazines.
"Nick and [Gawker editor] Gabriel [Snyder] and I had been talking about—and this is Nick's term—is iterative reporting, or iterative journalism," he said. "One of the things we want to do is the kind of story that would be potentially a two-, a three-, a four-, or five-thousand-word investigative-type story that might be in a magazine or newspaper but do it one post at a time and toss seeds out and threads out and see what happens."
He pointed to the Josh Marshall method.
"We don't want to do things that are long," he said. "That stuff doesn't work. I was accustomed to doing the kind of thing where you spend six weeks reporting and working on a story and developing sources and finding new information and doing all the things you do for a 5,000-word story, and then you sit down, you collect it all and you write it, and it's edited and published. You take that amount of work and the amount of the skill that it requires and here you'd just do it live. You start with whatever your first nugget of information is and put it out there and see what develops. It's an opening-up-the-notebook kind of thing."

"Nick and [Gawker editor] Gabriel [Snyder] and I had been talking about—and this is Nick's term—is iterative reporting, or iterative journalism," he said. "One of the things we want to do is the kind of story that would be potentially a two-, a three-, a four-, or five-thousand-word investigative-type story that might be in a magazine or newspaper but do it one post at a time and toss seeds out and threads out and see what happens."

He pointed to the Josh Marshall method.

"We don't want to do things that are long," he said. "That stuff doesn't work. I was accustomed to doing the kind of thing where you spend six weeks reporting and working on a story and developing sources and finding new information and doing all the things you do for a 5,000-word story, and then you sit down, you collect it all and you write it, and it's edited and published. You take that amount of work and the amount of the skill that it requires and here you'd just do it live. You start with whatever your first nugget of information is and put it out there and see what develops. It's an opening-up-the-notebook kind of thing."