Right now, I am sitting in the living room of a lovely home on Harbour Island as a guest of Mark and Eileen Fischer of Deep Impact Custom Boats. We’re here for the Florida Powerboat Club Bahamas Poker Run. Deep Impact Custom Boats is the presenting sponsor for the 35th annual event. Tomorrow we head back to South Florida.
Reporting and publishing from the road are a joy and privilege made easier by information technologies.
And yet three event-coverage stories went live today on speedonthewater.com. How did this happen?
Well, first and foremost this is my job. No matter where I am, daily news has to publish—you know—daily. Plus, while every job has its drudgery I love storytelling. There’s a story in every event, every boat and every person. Telling it is a privilege.
Beyond the actual work, information technology from mobile phones to email to photo file transfer programs to email makes it happen. Without that stuff, today’s stories on the Bahamas event, the Binks Memorial Fun Run for Addiction Awareness and the Vivi Jo Memorial Barbie Poker Run articles wouldn’t have happened. I wrote and published the Bahamas and Binks pieces. J.R. Bellis covered the Vivi Jo affair. I edited it and published it.
All stories on speedonthewater.com have photos, meaning digital photos from various shooters get sent to me and I work with the images in Photoshop before I publish the finished stories published through a simple content management system called WordPress. Some articles have a single images, others have dozens. Photo quality and story length dictate volume.
Yesterday during lunch at Wreckers restaurant in Spanish Wells, a social media creator asked me if I use A.I. to generate content. I smiled and shook my head. That technology has some fantastic applications, but right now at least it can’t interview people. Nor can it see what I see.
Nor can it form human relationships, which are essential in this line of work. Nor can it tell stories the way I want them told.
Short version? For what I do every day, A.I. isn’t close to where it needs to be.
Plus, as I said I love storytelling. And it’s my livelihood. Why would I give it up in favor of an utterly soulless technology, not matter how “brilliant” it becomes?
Communication is the foundation of storytelling, and information technology makes that a whole lot more efficient. It makes the challenge of working and publishing from the road possible. As for the storytelling, I still have the joy and the privilege.