I got my start at and spent many years working for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, where I did just about everything - local coverage, presidential campaigns, reporting from Latin America - before working on various prize-winning series while based in Washington, D.C.
Then two things happened.
One: Hurricane Katrina struck and nearly destroyed New Orleans. Three years earlier, I’d worked on a series that basically predicted what would happen. Though the scenario the series outlined was quite plausible, I was stunned. I’d written plenty about the environment, globalization, and government, but the storm and the vast ruination in the city and across the Gulf Coast convinced me that the world really is changing faster and more violently than we thought, and we aren’t prepared for it.
Two: I left the paper. For various reasons, I was ready to leave. Along with my co-author on the hurricane series, Mark Schleifstein, I wrote Path of Destruction, a book on the long, tragic history leading up to Hurricane Katrina - how the attempts over the years to fortify southern Louisiana backfired so spectacularly in that awful week in 2005, and how there’s more danger on the horizon. Since then, I’ve been working as an independent journalist, writing for magazines and newspapers and exploring the electronic frontiers of journalism.
My various focuses include: Globalization, that poorly understood buzzword. What effects are the rapid growth of trade, resource extraction, and having on global ecology and culture, and on the shape of daily life? Science. We’ve entered a time when we can no longer distinguish between what is “natural” and what is “artificial.” What does this mean? Politics and media. The web has transformed politics. Except when it turns out it hasn’t.
My blog can be found here, links to some of my work here.
My posts on the Guardian online
To contact me, send email to johnmcquaid at verizon dot net.
