Friday, April 3, 2009

Young Guns in Metro Politics

I have a story out today for Metromode.com about young politicians in the region. The experience writing this was similar to a piece I did last year on female head Chefs in that the angle I was assigned to write turned out to be bogus. In the case of the Chef story, I was asked to explore why a male-dominated kitchen has kept chicks out of head positions, and then learned that, actually, none of the women I spoke to felt held-down at all and that they were avoiding leadership positions by choice, for a variety of reasons.

For this new piece, I went at it trying to get a sense of what it was like to be a young, progressive politician coming up against the frustrating stagnation or even corruption of the old guard. On the contrary, what I heard from everybody I spoke to was that things were humming along, they loved their older colleagues, and metro Detroit has some amazing and positive things happening behind the scenes.

It made me happy, I'm telling you. I can't even listen to the news anymore because the tone is so funereal. I am proud to be telling a positive story, and to have come by that story honestly.

"Young Guns in Metro Politics"

2 comments:

Grandma said...

Daniel, you are such a good writer. You have a way with words. I wish for you even more success in writing. I love to write and did some free lance writing (short articles for religious publications)several years ago but found as time went on "in house" writers sort of made the market diminish for outsiders.

Matt Johnson said...

Great stuff Dan. I know I'm bias, but I think you are an amazing writer, musician and dad. Now if I can only get you to record my wedding song that you've been promising for the last 7 years...