A farmer’s experiment using stuffed toy tigers to frighten away menacing monkeys may prove to be the inspiration that will spark a reinvention of journalism in Bhutan, the remote Himalayan kingdom known for its daring goal to achieve Gross National Happiness (GNH). That’s the hope that sums up my recent trip to Bhutan, where I worked with some of the country’s leading newspaper, television and radio journalists.
Rob Manning, an education reporter at Oregon Public Broadcasting, has just proved something that we've argued all along: Journalists can still produce in-depth stories about important, complex issues in interesting and compelling ways. His secret weapon: kids ... adorable kids.
Ride your bicycle down to the end of Bay Road, past the houses, the abandoned supermarket and the metal recycling yards, and you end up at the bay, of course. It’s a place of muck, trash and soggy timbers washed up by the tide. That’s where we used to float a raft like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. And if we fell in, we had to walk home smelling like you-know-what. But that’s what we did when we were kids growing up during the 1950s and 60s in East Palo Alto, on the “wrong side” of U.S. 101.
