Blind Journey: A Journalist’s Memoirs by Jack Hawn reveals a life of struggle, searching out in the dark for truth while trying to keep sane in a wild world.
Following leads to verifying information. Chasing down important people and creating genuine connections with collaborators. Journalists carry a big burden, and that is not even taking into account the time and effort to take a story and everything in it and make it digestible to the general audience. The life of a journalist seems so exciting, but, like with everything; there are hidden conflicts and considerations most people never think about.
I was one of those people. I only thought that they simply needed to reach a word count and send whatever they’d written in. In the mental landscape of my mind, I had always imagined journalists to be seedy and deceptive folk who only knew how to wheedle the truth out because they came from an established institution and that whatever truth they got was only the omissions their sources gave them. In my mind, journalists were people who gathered in penthouse suites and cozied up to the rich and the powerful, only writing stories about how aggrieved the latter were and that they were as vulnerable to everything as the rest of us were. Of course, these assumptions, narrow as they were, led me to—without outright hating them—distrust journalists and journalism as a field. I would have drinks with them, sure, but I would never tell them anything—if my life did not depend on it.
But after reading Blind Journey, I was gobsmacked by the reality of it all. The truth, as they say, is seldom exposed gently. I am a bit ashamed that I even held my previous ideas—but we are all young once, and what is important is that we grow from the experience.
Blind Journey: A Journalist’s Memoirs by Jack Hawn is an absolutely compelling memoir. Although he was never a major journalist, nor did he ever achieve a big name, Jack Hawn’s life, specifically his 43-year-long writing career, is beautifully described, and readers are taken along as he goes through the years, trying to follow the truth and discovering what life had in store for him. Blind Journey explores Jack Hawn struggling against the daily grind while, somehow, still keeping the optimism he had in his youth.
And while his journalistic endeavors were not as exciting and as world-changing as his contemporaries’, Mr. Hawn always found a turn, a way to make things as exciting as they could be—and I believe this is an important lesson everyone should try to learn.
As a journalist, Jack Hawn covered mostly celebrities and other important figures in the entertainment industry. He covered the exploits of one Muhammad Ali (even during the days he still called himself Cassius Clay) and wrote stories about Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and other prominent individuals at the time.
How wonderful that must all sound, right? To have the opportunity to mingle with the classiest and most highly regarded of society. But it is not without cost, as I found out reading Blind Journey. Chasing celebrities and doing all you can to make a story work are difficult challenges.
Although journalists have access to very important people and also have the legitimacy to question them, that privilege is only for the most decorated and trusted journalists. Pencil-pushers and desk jockeys don’t usually get the chance to interview the King of Pop, or the Rock, or the CEO of Disney, let alone get the chance to interview the King of Morocco or the Queen of England.
Instead, what most journalists get is a ton of work trying to confirm whether a lead is true or not or whether the source they just contacted knew what they were talking about. Most of all, it’s the time away from family and friends that makes it all so disheartening.
Yet, it is not without a good end. And if you want to know what that is, you have to read Blind Journey: A Journalist’s Memoirs by Jack Hawn. It’s available everywhere you get your online books.
Alex Writes 