Gimme Shelter
So here’s the thing: I have the passion to be an investigative journalist, but not the… I dunno… motivation. I so badly want to be the kind of girl that could go undercover or rough it in the trenches with the troops, but I honestly don’t think I have it in me. I picked up the San Francisco Bay Guardian in Oakland waiting for BART last week and was amazed at the front page story: a piece by Amanda Witherell about the City’s decrepit housing system for the homeless, the inefficiency of the system and her personal experience spending nearly a week in the shelters. The statistics are staggering, and the story is incredibly compelling — especially in a place where all of us encounter the huge homeless population on a daily basis. But what surprised me most was not the fact that SF’s shelter system is ineffective (duh) but that Amanda opted to get out of her office, skip the research-and-interview-only writing method favored by most lazy journalists and see what all the fuss was about. In addition, she documented her experience in an online journal you can read here. So cool! I feel like I couldn’t step into a shelter without someone questioning my motives, so I’m impressed that she pulled this off… The story is exactly the kind of thing we’re hoping you’ll find in Ethsix’s issue #3.
Photo courtesy of Kaleb(Froggy) via Flickr.
