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It's completely different, for instance, to report on poor farmers in Africa than it is to report on, say, poor African-Americans. The familiarity of my readers with the terrain, and their preconceptions, are quite different in those two cases, and their perspective, as I imagine it, has to be taken into account at every turn.

William Finnegan

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William Finnegan
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 1
Autobiographer
Journalist
Surfer
Writer
New York City
New York
Turns
Americans
Reports
Poor
Reader
Readers
Two
Completely
African
Different
Cases
Account
Preconceptions
Every
Turn
Africa
Terrain
Quite
Instance
Familiarity
Imagine
Accounts
Report
Taken
Perspective
Farmers

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I've felt afraid as a reporter many times. Sometimes it's sharp, as in a bad moment, or a bad situation other times it's general, as in a country known for kidnapping, where you can never quite relax.
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I'm trying to find out what's actually true, which is nearly always something, if not a world of things, that you can't read in books.
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Hawaii is the birthplace of surfing, and many Hawaiians or part-Hawaiians surf, but in the rest of the United States it's a pretty white sport.
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I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.
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Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.
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Poor-country surf communities can be complex and, to some extent, leveling. The fisherman's kid is competing head to head with the plutocrat's gilded son. Your father can't buy you a good frontside hack.
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Memoir is a weird genre for a reporter. You end up investigating your own memories, reporting out your past.
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Speaking generally, I think it's useful to acknowledge explicitly the power imbalance between a journalist and the protagonists in a story about poor people, even to make that imbalance part of the story - and to redress it, narratively, where you can.
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I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.
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There are big surfing communities in every country with an ocean coast that I know in Central and South America. Same with Mexico, Bali, and nearly every island nation that gets waves in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But that's a relatively recent development in most places.
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