Who the hell do we think we are?

11/16/05 - The Mojo City News has been reconfigured to become a point of commentary for the Bird Flu. While MCN remains a fictional newspaper in a fictional city, it has taken on a real-world mission - to serve as a center point of commentary on the Bird Flu. It is likely that the coming pandemic will cause death on a scale never before imagined in this world. We cannot afford to simply let it come to us. It's time for the people of this country to stand up and fight for their own survival, and not leave it to the ineffectual meanderings of the political elite, because they are fast proving inadequate to the job.

Cody Barstow, Ph.D., while not real, remains our primary commentator since we would like to retain a degree of anonymity in the coming mess we see ahead of us. Cody, however, does reflect the views and understandings of the site's owner, another holding of the Ph.D. level in education and an all-round thinker about stuff.

We're The Mojo City News. A killer organization of a bunch of journalist types who just got tired of dealing with all the crap out there in the world and writing the same stories (I wish I could have written one where some politician said he took full responsibility for screwing up ... and he got some jail time for that. But no. Life doesn't work that way) so I got together with a few friends of mine and we moved here to Mojo City and started a community-based newspaper.
Totally online. No trees killed. No gas used in delivery.

We're writing the story of the people here. Not some politician's idiocies.
Every semester, for example, someone hacks into the school system computers and downloads the grades. Somehow, we always get our hands on the file and we publish those grades. You'd think this'd tick some people off, but after the initial shock, people suddenly realized that they finally had a way to keep track of the school system and could judge if it was failing, or doing great stuff in terms of its sacred duty to educate our young.

Lots of times, stories just walk into the offices. The offices aren't much ... some low-rent space and old wooden tables. But we've got good chairs because if you're spending your days writing, your butt's got to be feeling good. And we're heavily into computer systems and one of our people's on the run now for a little invasion of some computer system at the Pentagon. No harm meant though, but the feds aren't all that understanding.

About those stories that just walk in ... the way the Mojo City paper does things that's different is that the reporters talk to anyone who wanders into the offices. If a fire happens, the fire marshal will walk in and talk to the reporter, and give us some color prints of the firefight. If Little William gets laid for the first time in his parents' bed, he comes into the paper and tells the reporter about it. The people are the reporters. We're just the writers. That perspective is huge.

You see, we're writing the people's history here. Not just the insanity of the elites.

What happens is a real basic form of community journalism. Little William got laid by Sweet Suzy ... it's his first time and that's worthy of noting in the public record, so we'll write it up for him. And we don't get caught up in the fire marshal's technical explanation for why something burned down. We want to know why it burned down in terms of people and possible motivations, and we want someone held accountable, if that's a proper expectation. And we'll report the dead.

Accountability. We figure that's part of our job. You know, if some little girl got murdered here and the cops blew it in terms of evidence and basically destroyed chances for a good evidence trail ... we'd be holding their damned feet to the fire. We wouldn't get all caught up in speculating "who done it." Nope. That's tabloid stuff. We've got community responsibilities. Our job is riding the people who screwed up so hard and so long, they're driven into the dust.
Yeah, maybe we are vigilantes. But this is the West.

There's something else. Working the job for so many years in the city can take something away from you. At first, there's this sense of wonder at the sheer range of incredible stories you run into. But over time, you learn that people don't want the incredible story, because it takes effort to try to make sense of it. Instead, they want the expected, the mugging, the killing, the politicians and the sex and the money ... all those stereotypes of our lives. So you begin to write the stereotypes. And the wonder of it all just slips away one day.

But here in Mojo City, we've been rediscovering the wonder. And we write about it, and we do not pass judgment on it, and we do not try to make sense of it. Some of this stuff keeps me awake at night, because it fails to fit into the boxes I could put all those other stories into. But that's okay.

Scott MacGregor