Dear Ken, Dear George
: Ken Lay and George Bush’s letters at the Smoking Gun [via Die Zeit]
East meets West
: Nick Denton took up Ken Layne‘s challenge (who would dare not?) to set up a meeting of bloggers while in New York. It was a small, select affair: Amy Langfield, Nick, and me at the fashionable Conde Nast cafeteria. Only Amy fit in. Ken and I didn’t. But then, I never do. We took the opportunity to badger Nick into leaving San Francisco (before he is ridden out of town on a rail) and moving to New York. San Francisco is so last millenium. And New York needs a bigger blogger community. We cannot be outdown by L.A., of all places.
: There is a bigger New York blogger get-together on March 1. Unfortunately, I can’t make it; I have important duty that night delivering pizza for my kid’s school fun night.
: And Amy writes today about the dangers of reporting; they come not only in places like Pakistan.
I’ve been in very few war zones, but I can tell you that over the years I’ve done hundreds of things as a reporter – thinking I had some sort of magic reporter safety bubble around me – that I never would have done otherwise. I walked alone into how many houses with suspicious men? I’ve gotten into cars with strangers, walked into freshly cleared bomb threat zones, written things that put people in jail or cost them their jobs. Someone stalked me at one of my newspaper jobs, going so far as to slice up pictures and other items on my desk one night. I got my first death threat while editor of my college paper. While I weighed each of those risks in the process, you are never 100 percent sure of what you’re getting into.
