Here is a story (LINK) about how one man made a distant and abstract business decision into a vivid and tangible reality for the man making that decision.
Rex Ziak didn’t want the ancient trees near his home to be cut down because they were real and beautiful parts of his life. But the man in charge of the logging, Bill Gordon, was managing the process from 3,000 miles away. Ziak took pictures of the trees to send to Gordon, but Ziak did not know how to make sure that Gordon really got a personal feel for the majesty of what was about to be cut down. Ziak wanted Gordon to personally experience the massive trees. So Ziak measured one of the trees with a rope—38 feet of rope, and sent the rope to Bill Gordon in Boston.
Gordon was so impressed by the size of the rope, especially when it would go all the way around his car that he reconsidered the logging project and sold the grove of trees to the nature conservancy.
This is what good journalism should be doing: making distant and abstract things real and tangible for us, so that we can make healthy decisions about real issues. News shouldn’t just be the same talking heads throwing abstract numbers and opinion back and forth. Good News should bring the far away and the hard to understand into our lives in a way that makes things real. Like Ziak’s rope did.
Rex Ziak didn’t want the ancient trees near his home to be cut down because they were real and beautiful parts of his life. But the man in charge of the logging, Bill Gordon, was managing the process from 3,000 miles away. Ziak took pictures of the trees to send to Gordon, but Ziak did not know how to make sure that Gordon really got a personal feel for the majesty of what was about to be cut down. Ziak wanted Gordon to personally experience the massive trees. So Ziak measured one of the trees with a rope—38 feet of rope, and sent the rope to Bill Gordon in Boston.
Gordon was so impressed by the size of the rope, especially when it would go all the way around his car that he reconsidered the logging project and sold the grove of trees to the nature conservancy.
This is what good journalism should be doing: making distant and abstract things real and tangible for us, so that we can make healthy decisions about real issues. News shouldn’t just be the same talking heads throwing abstract numbers and opinion back and forth. Good News should bring the far away and the hard to understand into our lives in a way that makes things real. Like Ziak’s rope did.
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