About Striking Distance
Striking Distance is a web publication for the liberatory efforts of Ithaca and the surrounding area. It will house written articles, with a focus on photography and shortform video.
The Origin of Striking Distance
“The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”
— Octavia Butler
I saw that quote right at the front of a biography of George Orwell written by Rebecca Solnit, titled Orwell’s Roses. At first it irritated me, for whatever reason. Then it hit me at a gut level—the truth of it.
Orwell is, of course, best known for his dystopian work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and many people had to read Animal Farm in school. But he was also a man who served the British Empire and then was highly critical of it. He was a socialist who lamented, in essays and journals, that the ease with which his political allies would discard facts did not suit them. For a while he was a struggling writer, and he worked in radio during an intensely dark time: World War II. He wrote his magnum opus after his wife died, during a dark time in his life. He then died of tuberculosis a few months after it was published.
This is all to say, I think about Orwell a lot, and Striking Distance has been created with a lot of intellectual inspiration drawn from Orwell, and in the vein of what he tried to do.
We are undoubtedly entering a dark time in our society, and in our world. Fascism rises across nations. Many have all but given up on our political system, understanding how it has been corrupted and captured by corporate money.
The United States has lost its moral standing in the eyes of many, domestically and abroad, for its support of global violence and its funding of a current genocide. The alternative hegemonies—China, Russia—are no better.
The trauma of endless wars, the constant staccato of mass shootings, the stress of a pandemic, and the internalized alienation of a society that systemically sacrifices its social safety nets and education systems so that it can offer tax breaks to the wealthy—all of these wear us down, and can make us feel powerless or angry.
And yet, many look forward in order to discern possibilities and offer warnings, in defiant acts of hope. Teachers do it in the schools. Organizers do it on zoom and in the streets. Groups of students do it in libraries and reserved rooms, after classes. And here, I would like to grow a platform where media makers can do it, as well.
Why "Striking Distance"
The phrase first came to mind when I was describing to someone a few years ago what defines good photography. The privileged can buy great cameras and great lenses, and might be able to fix technical errors using software. But the photography will still be mediocre.
In order to really get the shot, you can’t just use a zoom telephoto lens and stay back, far from the action. This may work for some compositions, but many times— especially photographing people—you need to use a wider angle, and need to get closer to the action, to get closer to the emotion. You need to get so close to what’s happening that you could be struck. That’s the striking distance. The photograph reflects when a photographer has the courage to stand where they need to stand, to position or contort their body in whatever way is needed to capture the truth and power of a moment.
I believe the same concept holds true for all of media and journalistic reporting. Media at a distance is often bad media. Media that overcomes fears—Will they yell at me and tell me to fuck off? Will I look weird doing it? Will I mess up?—is powerful media that shows the experiential truth of subjects. When you get within striking distance, you don’t just risk getting struck, but your proximity to the action allows the creation of media that strikes the distance between the story itself and the consumer of that media.
So I liked that. I kept thinking about it.
The People's Paper and the ITU Blog
In 2021, I had been involved in an effort, started by the Ithaca chapter or SURJ, to start a People’s Paper. This was about a year after the George Floyd uprising. It was a good learning experience, but it never got off the ground for a few reasons.
During the People’s Paper attempt, there were different views and understandings of what a people’s paper should be. Many wanted it to be a volunteer-run effort. I had a vision that was more focused on paying people for their work—for individuals in communities we rarely hear from, and also for those that were essentially doing journalism work to go out and find stories and write about them after doing all the necessary relationship-building and research. I was concerned that in the absence of paying people for their time, it would be more privileged people with higher levels of education and more free time that would write about movements and issues that affected people like them. How would someone working two or three low-wage jobs, who perhaps has a family, have the free time to put their story into words and work on edits, if they’d never get compensated?
Ultimately, the project slowly came to a halt as people lost steam. By that time, I was doing a lot of volunteer media with the Ithaca Tenants Union. I started the Ithaca Tenants Union blog, and a couple of my fellow organizers wrote pieces that were very much in the vein of a people’s paper.
The core concern then was the same as it is now: what do we do when human experiences or wrongdoing by those who have some sort of power are deemed by those who run the media apparatus as not worthy of public attention? Do we put our tail between our legs and shut up? Do we lash out in anger on social media? Or do we build the alternative that we want to see?
Case Studies
It turned out that the blog worked well for what it was. Multiple stories wound up getting picked up by newspapers after my friends and I reported them.
Case Study 1: Pizza Aroma building condemnation ITU Blog → Ithaca Voice
Case Study 2: Habitat for Humanity’s efforts to evict Kathy Majors: ITU Blog → Ithaca Times
Case Study 3: the demolition of a home and gathering space being used by Clint Halftown’s armed forces: ITU Blog → Ithaca Voice
To their credit, that last one would have been covered by The Voice, and a journalist came up the following day.
However, it proved valuable for us to break the story just a few hours after Clint Halftown’s hired security and demolition team perpetrated the attack on Wanda John. How that story got covered and understood by the public became a battle of truth vs. lies. This was because Halftown’s PR team immediately sent out lies and misinformation about the occurrence, in the form of press releases to local publications.
The press releases claimed that the house was uninhabitable and unoccupied. It was neither of those things. I had received word of the demolition as it was happening, and I was able to interview the person in the house who had been violently removed, Wanda John, and witnesses about an hour and a half after it happened. But some local media published Halftown’s falsities without fact checking.
In fact, one of the journalists at the publication Finger Lakes Daily News threatened to sue me for libel, because I called him out for publishing Halftown’s lies without fact checking. History was—in this case—on the side of truth. That publication has since taken the published press release down. The link now returns a not-found result: www.fingerlakesdailynews.com/2022/08/03/1528685/
However, the fact that they published the inaccurate information has been logged by the Internet Archive. If you plug in the above link into the Internet Archive, you can see the archived version of the article here.
It is interesting to think about what might have happened if a media person was not present at the site right after the attack. Would it still be contested whether the house was unoccupied? Would the truth have gotten out?
I can’t say for sure, but this experience is one that has led me to feel I need to do this type of work to the best of my abilities.