I've talked a lot about various things Lawson saw on this site, and I've talked a bit about the tools I'm using to describe what I see as I follow his path. A good bit of how I'm going about that I learned 20 years ago, on a remarkable project called An Appalachian Adventure, which documented a sort of group relay through-hike of the Appalachian Trail, the  2,200-mile footpath that stretches from Georgia to Maine.

That project combined the resourced of five newspapers -- the Hartford Courant, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Maine Sunday Telegram and Portland Press-Herald, and the Raleigh News & Observer. It should tell you all you need to know about how important that project was to me that today, 20 years later, I could type in each one of those newspaper names perfectly, with hyphens and ampersands and so forth all correct. (The Atlanta paper, by the way, is so in love with its AJC abbreviation that to check the hyphen I had to go to Wikipedia -- I couldn't find the actual paper name on the website. But I checked, and it's right.) Each paper had reporters and photographers and artists hike a segment of the trail, in order, and report in once a week. All five papers ran every story -- 32 in total, if I recall correctly. As Backpacker Magazine noted, "the effort even ha[d] its own page on the World Wide Web." Gracious! The link is now dead, of course, and most of the stories live in that flickering half-light of the morgues of newspapers that just cannot figure out for the life of them some sort of way to put old stories online. Oh, if only there were some kind of technology for that! Here's a link to a summary story from the AJR, but if any of the rest is online I can't find it. It did become a book though. You can order it!

Anyhow, I even bring it up because to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our joint adventure, many of us fortunate enough to be paid to go hiking back in the day got together last week at Harpers Ferry to remember, walk, visit with the people at the Appalachian Trail Conference, and eat and drink, as you do. We had a large time.

We talked a good bit about changes in technology. Everything the Lawson Trek does instantly, alone, and on the spot -- updating blog posts from barrier islands, Instagraming from canoe in the middle of the Intracoastal Waterway -- the Appalachian Adventure crew had to do in ways far more complex and with a support staff of dozens.

The photographers all talked about souping film in hotel room sinks or dropping it off at Walmart, then picking up the negatives and using scanners to ship chosen images to photo editors. Reporters recall using early laptops like the Toshiba T1000 (a svelte 9 pounds!) and wiggling telephone plugs to make decent connections to download stories to the editor. We all had drivers who would pick up our stuff and drive it along to our next weekly stops. The News & Observer even had a telephone service by which I put tape-recorded sounds (hiking, interviews, even playing the recorder I think) onto a system readers could dial in and hear. Quel interactive! I even carried a camera for a local TV station on our first trip, which meant bringing back a camera, having them look at the video, setting it up, and then interviewing me in a local park while they showed the video. I had to comment on it without watching, because having me and the anchors see the video at the same time was just too crazy.

It's all obviously different now. I live-stream with Periscope, share photos instantly with Instagram, automatically update pages on Facebook and Twitter, and carry nothing heavier than a tablet that weighs less than a pound, though even then I rarely use it -- I carry my phone, a Bluetooth keyboard, and  a set of lenses that stick to the phone, and I'm prepared to shoot, edit, produce, upload, and instantly publish words, images, sounds, and video. I joke that like Lawson I'm hiking from wifi hotspot to wifi hotspot, but the reality is I'm doing journalism in a way that wasn't even possible a few years ago.

On the other hand, the journalism itself hasn't changed, and we should all remind ourselves of that. My job is still to tell the story as clearly and honestly as possible. I still need to get my facts and names straight, still need to tell a story somebody wants to read, watch, or listen to, still need to respect my story, my sources, and my medium. If my stories CAN go up faster, that doesn't mean they DO or they SHOULD. Sometimes I blog while I'm on the trail, but I found out early on that blogging daily was more than people wanted to know, so I blog only a couple times a week while I'm traveling, and sometimes less than that while off the trail. More than, say, 4 Instagram images a day is just overkill, so I very rarely do that (and when I do I am usually wrong for doing it).

When we did Appalachian Adventure, all five papers got together and set up a loose agreement on topics for each week's story -- that is, I wasn't just hiking: I was hiking and thinking about geology, and I was presumed to have done s bit of research before leaving home. That way we avoided 32 weeks of "Woohoo, look at me! Here I am on the Appalachian Trail!" and made sure certain pieces of information we needed to get in there got in.

I've done much the same. Whether it's maps or wayfinding or Native Americans or the French Huguenots or the swamps or the plants or old roads or Lawson's background or his technology or anything else, I did research before leaving, I try to drag interesting people onto the trail with me, and I try to avoid too much "Woohoo! Look at me! I'm on Lawson's Trail!" Now as then, the most interesting things to write about are the people I meet. Now as then, I am enormously behind in telling you things I haven't got around to telling you yet. Now as then, I'm the storyteller -- and the narrator. I'm your eyes and ears, bringing you to the story. I'm not the story. I forget that at my own peril.

Anyhow. It was a treat to see a bunch of wonderful journalists 20 years after we did something of which I'm still very proud. I'm still pretty impressed that they even let me hang around with them back then. And I'm hoping one or more of them will join me on the Lawson Trek before all is said and done. I'm grateful for all I learned from them, and I'm grateful to be on the trail again.

As Lawson would have said had he had the reason and the capacity, stay tuned.

A big part -- an enormous part -- of the Lawson Trek has nothing to do with Lawson and everything to do with telling stories, and as I read over what I've written and shared so far I feel I've underrepresented that. We'll have more cool stories about Indians and wildlife and such later. 

But one thing I have to worry about that Lawson did not have to worry about is what tools to use to document my journey. Lawson had pens, likely made from the quills of the turkeys he and his companions constantly ate, and he had notebooks. And that was it. Eight years later when he got over to England to visit, he published a book about his experiences, and that was about the usual order of things: something happened, and then eight years later a book came out and people got to hear about it.

That's not quite how it is now. Lawson did not, as I commonly suggest, have to make his way from wifi hotspot to wifi hotspot, constantly looking for a decent signal so he could update his blog or his Instagram feed. I do, though. I update Instagram several times most days -- every day when I'm on the trail -- and try to blog once or twice a week. So anybody who wants to know about the Lawson Trek is never more than an internet connection away from what's up, not just lately but right now.

So last night, through the good offices of the Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC) and the UNC Science and Medical Journalism Program I was invited to share my methods, which I did, and here's a video of that.

The good news is, yay, video! An hour's discussion of all the issues -- connectivity, equipment, frequency, audience -- that the modern one-person band who is both journalist and publishing company needs to consider. The bad news is the sound is pretty awful throughout, for some reason, and in a way that's a great object lesson. We used a YouTube streaming process, which I've never used before, and we learned by doing. One of the things I learned is that the sound quality needs tweaking -- whether there's a way to do this I do not know. 

Another little glitch is that no matter how many times YouTube tells Weebly (my blog editor) that it wants the video to start at 38 seconds, Weebly starts the video at 00, which gives you 38 lovely seconds of blackness to scrub through before you get to watch the video. This is the kind of stuff you find out by doing it -- much the way I learned that Instagram, not Twitter, was my sharing tool of first resort. Using Twitter made sharing with other apps complex, whereas Instagram plays well with everybody -- to say nothing of giving me lots of caption space. One single Instagram post and voila! Instagram, two Twitter feeds, two Facebook pages, and my blog landing page all have a pretty picture. You do and you learn.

We'll figure out YouTube's psychological issues and we'll move forward.

I know for live-streaming I can now use tools like Periscope and Meerkat -- I've tried them and they work.  I'm especially interested in Periscope. So if you're a fourth-grade teacher, or a journalism class, or a group from anyplace else that thinks it would be cool to talk to the Lawson Trek from the trail (or a science journalism fellowship at the greatest technical university in the world), drop a line -- we'd love to try it out.

And anyhow, whatever else you do, try out these iPhone lenses. They're amazing.

One of my undertakings on the Lawson Trek as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT is to think about more than just about Lawson and the scientific and cultural observations he made. I'm also trying out current journalistic tools and seeing how they compare to Lawson's. I'm a science journalism fellow, not just a science fellow.

That is, Lawson made a trip in 1700-1701 and told the world about when next he could -- in a book in 1709, which was a perfectly reasonable turnaround at the time. My time scale is somewhat less casual, and part of my work is to learn to use the astonishing tools that allow me to remain constantly constant. 

I built this website to learn how to build a website. I'm going along on my trip and keeping anybody who's interested apprised moment by moment on an Instagram feed that appears on the Lawson Trek homepage; on Tweets and Facebook posts (I chose Instagram because it plays well with others; I thought I'd be live-Tweeting, but Instagram transfers to Twitter way better than Twitter transfers to anything else -- lesson learned). I have shared information from a canoe in the Intracoastal Waterway, updated my status from a barrier island during a wicked storm, transferred pictures in the field from my GoPro to my phone to my blog, taken pictures with special iPhone lenses, and used solar power to recharge all my devices. It's been a hoot, and I'll have things to tell you about all that eventually.

That is, I am practicing the journalism of my time just as Lawson told stories in a way that was appropriate for his. A good bit of what he wrote had rather a chamber of commerce feel to it -- he was clearly encouraging people to come live in Carolina -- so you have to recognize this, as people certainly would have then. But even Lawson, when he told you stories he had heard secondhand, let you know that.

So I'm kind of heartbroken that given current events I have to make a point of this, but I will: everything I tell you on this site is as true as I can make it. If somebody just tells me something, I'll tell you that, and who told it to me. If I see something myself, I'll tell you that too. I'll even shoot pictures and video when I can. If I do research I'll either link to a source or tell you the source; and if I don't, and you come looking for it, I'll supply it.

The reason I even bring it up is because on the trek's first segment (summarized just this week on the Scientific American Blog Network!) something interesting happened. I was making my way hither and yon, and a reporter I had contacted at the Charleston Post and Courier named Bo Peterson gave a call to Nature Adventure Outfitters, which was functioning as my base camp and support structure during that segment. He wanted to do a story and wanted to meet me somewhere where he and a shooter could observe me in the canoe and getting out of the water. So I got a call  (on my cell phone, either out in the water or at camp the night before, I can't remember) and we organized a way for him to meet me and my current guide at a stop I planned to make, at the Sewee Shell Ring. 

Which meant that, just about the time Bo, his shooter, and a few other Lawson Trek friends expected us, we came paddling up a little tidal creek towards the boardwalk at the shell mound. Bo and his shooter had expected me to have a canoe paddle, but I was using a kayak paddle (rather easier, when you're canoeing alone, than switching sides every stroke or three). One of them said something about it, and one of the people with Nature Adventure Outfitters said she could call me and get me to pick up the canoe paddle if they liked. Bo and the shooter were appropriately horrified. They're telling the story of what happens, not making it happen. Remember the scene in "Broadcast News" where Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks fight about whether the soldier they're filming was going to put his boot on whether they filmed him or not? Sounds like it was like that.

I love professional journalists.

I mention that only as background. What I really want to tell you is that after we pulled up, and after a good hour or so of chatting, conversation, lunch, and good fellowship that led to Bo's excellent story, I went to clamber aboard the canoe and head out. 

Then I remembered -- I wasn't sure I had adequately sung the praises of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, which I wanted to do to be both polite and very accurate. I wouldn't be on this project without its help, so I want MIT and the Fellowship program to be very happy with what they see. Anyhow, I asked Bo to make sure he remembered to mention that and he tossed his head. "That goes without saying," he said. "They're the funding organization; of course I'll mention them." And of course he did.

I tell you this because for the next month I told that story: "This is what it's like when you deal with a pro," I said. "He is accurate and responsible, and he makes sure to include elements of the story that I forget or don't think are important." He's a trained, experienced journalist and he knows that besides the knucklehead in the canoe with the crazy journey, the story involves why, and how, and who pays for it, and all that stuff. He's listening to my story, but he's making sure he tells the story, as he understands it. I was thrilled and kept telling people how happy I was to have dealt with Bo -- this is dealing with a pro, and I kept making the comparison to, say, some blogger (like me!) who may or may not be trained and may not think of all the stuff trained journalists have been taught to think of. I happen to have spent years in newsrooms, so I think I'm trained. I read plenty by bloggers who spent years in newsrooms and are trained and plenty by bloggers I don't think did, and who I don't think are. So I was real happy with Bo.

Then came this week, and the Rolling Stone debacle, when a trusted magazine ran an extremely high-profile article about campus rape, making extremely inflammatory accusations, without coming close to checking the accuracy of its sources, and I wanted to scream. This is dealing with the pros? This big-deal, New York, professional journalism organization printed stuff that it just really was pretty sure it thought was true. And suddenly there's no difference between the pros and anybody else. Suddenly, just like after every Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair or James Frey, I have to do what it seems journalists -- especially independent journalists publishing on their own sites, like this one -- constantly have to do now.

I have to promise you I'm telling the truth.

I consider myself a professional. I believe everything I tell you is true. If I have any reason to doubt, I wait; if I tell you something that seems uncertain, I tell you where I learned it and to what degree I believe it. If I make an accusation or disturbing claim (I strongly doubt on the Lawson Trek I will ever do such a thing but just the same if I do) I'll make sure I'm not running off on a single source, becoming an unwitting tool of someone with an agenda or, worse, an unwitting tool of my own agenda that I'm too blind to see. 

Everyplace I tell you I go, I really go. Everything I tell you I see, I really see. If I tell you something is true and it's old, I probably got it from a trustworthy source that I can produce; if I tell you something is true and it's current, chances are I saw it myself and have told you all about that.

Now I know -- the real tragedy here of the Rolling Stone piece of course is that there's still plenty of reasons to believe the alleged victim in that story genuinely was hurt, but because of Rolling Stone's lousy standards she'll now find it very hard to be believed. And expanding the depth of field a bit wider, of course, we now have to worry about all (alleged!) victims of sexual misconduct being afraid to come forward because it's now one untrustworthy story harder to believe them. 

But even that's just part of the picture. The real picture is a story like the Rolling Stone story is an assault on all reporting, on all nonfiction. Those of us who tell true stories for a living have only one thing to sell: the truth of what we report. This is real. This happened. I can tell you this because I know this, and I know the difference between "I know this" and "I pretty much think I know this" and "wouldn't this be nice?" And every time Rolling Stone or one of the people I mentioned above does something like this it makes it harder and harder for people like me to tell the truth and make a living at it, because the temptation to tell lies -- or to lower your standards when the story just seems really, really good or worth it -- is constant. 

The Rolling Stone mess doesn't just make it harder for rape victims telling the truth. It makes it harder for people telling the truth about climate change or evolution or the moon landings. Or their childhoods or racism or sexism. Or long walks around the Carolinas looking for the path of someone else who passed through 300 years ago.