LETTERS: Youth Will be Served, No Nukes, and Joe O'Donnell a Victim?

By: E&P Staff Editor & Publisher welcomes and appreciates your feedback on the reports and columns we deliver each day. Here are some of the most recent reader missives.

As always, drop us a line at letters@editorandpublisher.com.

Duck and Cover, Indeed
Thank you for the reminder of the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons and our first-strike, "nothing off the table" policy.

Every time AP repeats their stylebook propaganda headline of Iran's "defiance" of the UN, I remind the folks here at the paper who the primary violators of the non-proliferation treaty are. I never see that story begin with "US defies non-proliferation treaty, proposes new nukes."

I was born the year before the atomic bomb, and for most of my life have argued the case against Nagasaki, which I still consider a field test of an entirely different A-bomb rushed into use before the Japanese could surrender. (Much as the Russians rushed to declare war before the Japanese could surrender).

This "duck and cover" boy sure doesn't feel any safer now than I did in those early Cold War days.

Best Regards,

Jerry Kleiner
Middletown, N.Y.


Photog Joe O'Donnell a Victim?
I worked for International Press Service of the United States Information Agency at the same time as Joe O'Donnell. The agency was very, very leery of letting any of its employees receive credit. Yoichi Okamoto, chosen by Johnson as his personal photographer, also worked for USIA. Both of these gentlemen were stars and under normal circumstances they would have been treated as such. I wrote columns on foreign affairs and on communist affairs under two different assigned bylines -- Paul L. Ford and Benjamin E. West.

As ?West,? I analyzed communist publications and broadcasts recorded by the CIA to arrive at conclusions totally at odds with the CIA. I suggested in January 1950 that Josef Stalin was ill and that his associates were preparing for his death. The CIA insisted he could not possibly be ill. He died two months later. I predicted the power struggle between Stalin's successor, Khrushchev and Malenkov, beginning in late 1955. In 1956, on the morning of the day Khrushchev took power, the CIA station chief in Moscow denounced my forecasts as false; "collective leadership" was the order of the day. As Paul Ford, I covered the decade's foreign ministers' and summit conferences. It was a ridiculous situation and I got out it, totally frustrated, in 1960.

My journalistic colleagues had no idea who Paul Ford and Ben West were.

Joe O'Donnell obviously had difficulty proving much of his work. I am luckier. I saved a majority of my columns with my name clearly at the bottom.

USIA was not about to build up any personalities regardless of the quality of the work. Joe O'Donnell must have been terribly frustrated. He was the victim of a crazy system.

Wes Pedersen
Chevy Chase, MD 20815


Youth Will Be Served
To Maegan Carberry: Good luck in your new venture. I was struck by one line in your intro: "Here I will be exploring how younger journalists can shape the future of news and storytelling."

Probably the oldest group Web site in existence is at melrosemirror.media.mit.edu. I'd guess the average age is 75. It's produced in Melrose, Mass. Started in 1996.

I'm part of a site that is beginning its fourth year in a town of 5,200, Rye N.H. (ryereflections.org -- http://ryereflections.org). We have a 16-year-old who's called "Rye's Guy in the Sky", because he is learning to fly and takes photos for us from up there from time to time, but otherwise most of our participants are over 55. There's no age requirement, but I would argue that a 72-year-old grandfather and graduate of Sloan School at MIT who has been an oral storyteller all his life and is now learning to write on the web will surely have an impact on shaping the future of news and storytelling as much as younger counterparts.

Same goes for a Melrose SilverStringer, who never wrote till age 86, but had a book published two years later based on his early articles about being a hobo during the Depression.

Don't get me wrong. I believe the younger journalists will and are having a major influence on the shape of the journalistic future in this country and globally (perhaps I should cite the work of The Junior Journal, which somehow lasted for seven years, from 1998 to 2005. It was written and edited by children/teens from 91 countries, with no adult supervision. More than 300 participated in this monthly publication that sometimes ran 70 stories in an edition, all of which is still available at http://journal.jrsummit.net. Why isn't it still going? The original group ranged in age from 11 to 16. The editors grew up -- it happens -- and went on to college.).

So I would hope you would explore how new journalists, not just young journalists, are shaping the future. It's an exciting, tantalizing period of shaping and shakeout.

Jack Driscoll
Editor-in-Residence, MIT Media Laboratory
Advisory Board, Center for Future of Civic Media