Here is a (by no means exhaustive) list of stories
I wrote during my stint as a travel industry news reporter at TTG
Asia. On some of these web pages the layout may be rather odd and
links will lead to strange places, but the basic content is readable.
A lot of this content will seem a bit sugary to
those who know me but keep in mind, while I may have been toeing
the corporate line and writing fluffy stuff about the zoo's new pandas,
I was writing it in a gritty, vibrant third-world country, where
danger and mystery was lurking just outside the door of every Seven
Eleven.
Further to the defence of my decision to sell my artistic integrity,
in investigating these stories, I was often placed in the periphery
of high-level intrigue. I stumbled across a good number of things
that were too hot to print; that our advertisers, powerful property
owners or high-ranking government officials (and their friends in
the police/army/mafia) would not like to see aired. If they were
to be aired, quite possibly so would I.
Also I got to cover the Miss Universe 2005 pageant.
In all, it was a crash education into the way things really work
(or don't). One result that's come of it is that I can now read/view
a news report and make a pretty good guess at what they're leaving
out of it, and where they're just full of shit. Another result of
questionable value is that I don't trust anything I don't see with
my own eyes.
Jeffrey
Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent
for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and
translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon
23 in
every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger
in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis
clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the
night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has
now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a
publishing career.
