The New, New, New Journalism

I’ve watched the changes of the past decade up close, in Turkey and France. Now I want to report from the Balkan route of the migrant trail; from Greece, Germany, and Belgium; from Britain as it debates its future in Europe, from Eastern Europe as it decides whether liberal democracy is truly an idea for which it has much use.

But since I published my first book, a strange thing happened: The traditional models for book publishing collapsed, and the old models for selling journalism, particularly from abroad, went extinct. (I’ve written about the baleful consequences of this for American awareness of the wider world here and here.)

I’m thus crowd-sourcing the funding for what I expect to be a year-long project to report from a rapidly-changing Europe. I plan to spend a year researching and reporting, then publish the book myself. Meanwhile, I'll be posting articles, video, audio, podcasts, Periscope – even VR, if it becomes popular fast enough.

I’ll ask you, my readers, to shape the journalism, to suggest what I should investigate, where I should go, and why; to submit questions for the people I interview, perhaps even help me interview them on Skype. You'll guide the project as I go along by helping me better to understand what my audience wants to know. Your questions and curiosity will better connect me to the stories I discover.

I anticipate writing a book of about 70,000 words. My working title is Brave Old World: Europe Revisited. While the book will be a sequel, it should also stand alone; I won't require the reader to read or remember the first book.