Cold Shoulder
January 17, 2008
On Saturday, I am sitting in a very cold, very drafty room in upstate New York. The room is in a house which is rather cold and drafty all over. Outside, it is snowing and the sounds of college students on break splinters through the wet air. Inside, the shuffling steps of people just waking up rattles the thin wooden windowpanes.
I am here to interview an old friend of mine for a long feature piece on green roofing. A green roof is a planted section of a flat rooftop that offers myriad energy solutions for a structure. Given all indications, green roofing might just be the biggest single design factor that could mitigate the enormous energy waste from buildings – by far the greatest energy consumers in the land.
And, given that sustainability is the new sexiness in the eco-friendly set, the story has legs. Especially in light of Al Gore’s winning of the Nobel Prize, a story on sustainable living actually has a chance to make it into prime media.
My friend, who, as a preliminary source at the moment shall go nameless, received his graduate degree in horticulture from Cornell University. He moved to New York City, and then to Maryland, working for several different green roof and horticulture companies. Now he’s relocated to upstate New York with drams of opening his own nursery, designed after his own inimitable engineering fashion; a sure success given my undying faith that he’s something of a bizarre genius.
Given all this, as I interview him on my brand new voice recorder, I have in the back of my mind the notion that here, there be danger. And questions lurk. Must I include in the story that this source and I lived together in college? Or that we also shared an apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City? What about all our college exploits? Adventures in travel? Nights of profound intoxication? Existential vision quests of the sort undertaken only by twenty-year-old suburban New Yorkers?
All these questions must be answered, now and every time I use an associate or friend in a piece. And from what I can tell, it is not unlikely that a working journalist uses friends often. They make for trustworthy sources on a variety of issues, so why not make good use of them?
But beware! Trust issues are unavoidable. Information left out because of personal entanglements; a soft eye in criticism; a trusting subtext in the story where none should exist. These subconscious landmines loom in a piece like this, and since this is my first time dealing with such a problem, I don’t yet know how to handle them.
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