William Finnegan
William Finnegan
William Finneganis a staff writer at The New Yorker and well-known author of works of international journalism. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
CountryUnited States of America
cannot good option
For billionaires who cannot buy good press, there is the option of buying the press.
anyway telling work
Writing is pretty flexible work, don't you think? If you want to surf, you just have to get a lot done when the waves are lousy. That's what I'm always telling myself, anyway - write while the surf's down!
bring everybody knowing lots parking poorly strangers travelled
As I travelled around Australia, strangers in pubs, on airplanes, in beach parking lots would bring up Gina Rinehart, not knowing I was writing about her. Everybody had something to say, some of it thoughtful, some of it poorly informed, some of it vividly obscene.
best far good happen manhattan north stay surf tends time top true waves window
There are good waves not that far from Manhattan - on Long Island, in north Jersey. It's true that the best surf around here tends to happen in winter, so you need a good wetsuit, and the time window of good waves is often pretty short, so you have to stay on top of the forecasts.
memories past genre
Memoir is a weird genre for a reporter. You end up investigating your own memories, reporting out your past.
country ocean america
There are big surfing communities in every country with an ocean coast that I know in Central and South America. Same with Mexico, Bali, and nearly every island nation that gets waves in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But that's a relatively recent development in most places.
believe surfing fiji
I remember surfing in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, even Madeira, when local fishermen had never seen a surfboard before, and refused to believe that we could ride a wave on one.
country father kids
Poor-country surf communities can be complex and, to some extent, leveling. The fisherman's kid is competing head to head with the plutocrat's gilded son. Your father can't buy you a good frontside hack.
blow world looks
It's so much harder than it looks - to conjure a fictional world that some passing wolf of skepticism can't just blow down in one breath.
jobs writing long
I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.
sports white surfing
Hawaii is the birthplace of surfing, and many Hawaiians or part-Hawaiians surf, but in the rest of the United States it's a pretty white sport.
cities community different
I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.
thinking people stories
Speaking generally, I think it's useful to acknowledge explicitly the power imbalance between a journalist and the protagonists in a story about poor people, even to make that imbalance part of the story - and to redress it, narratively, where you can.
taken two perspective
It's completely different, for instance, to report on poor farmers in Africa than it is to report on, say, poor African-Americans. The familiarity of my readers with the terrain, and their preconceptions, are quite different in those two cases, and their perspective, as I imagine it, has to be taken into account at every turn.