I have often in my life felt unsure of myself. Especially when I took on a new job or task that was outside of my comfort zone or required a skill set that I was not sure I possessed.
I can remember starting jobs and worrying that my employers would soon discover I was a fraud and that I could not accomplish what was being asked of me.
In all of those cases I did in fact manage to rise to the challenge despite my misgivings or insecurities. And in fact often the jobs evolved to fit my personality so well that finding a replacement for me when I left was a real challenge.
When I started The Immoral Minority I felt much the same way. After all who cared what some dude in Alaska thought about politics, religion, and world affairs? But then I discovered that quite a lot of people did.
And when this job evolved into one that required actual reporting, and conducting interviews, all of those insecurities came right back.
In many ways I lack the essential component that makes a good reporter. I am not all that nosy.
Part of that is undoubtedly from living in Alaska where we tend to have a live and let live philosophy, and part of it is that I am kind of shy and not very aggressive when it comes to talking to people I don't know.
However I have discovered that I am in somewhat of a unique position so I have attempted to put my insecurities and self doubts aside in the interest of getting the story.
All of the above may seem a little off topic, but in fact it is background to help explain why I have not posted the stories that I talked about starting way
back in September.
You see at that time I was quite confident that we would be getting all of the information out before Halloween. And besides that I was pretty sure that Korey Klingenmeyer was about to press charges.
Obviously things did not work out quite that way.
To be honest I don't know what happened with Klingenmeyer, but I can explain what happened with my source and the story we were working on.
Essentially I lost contact with her.
The first thing that happened was that work responsibilities for both of us kept making it hard to get together, and then she had a training to attend out of state, and then, to be honest, I simply lost track of her.
Suddenly my e-mails and text messages were not being returned, and phone calls went to voice mail. This started at the end of October, and I did not hear from her again until the beginning of this month and only had a real conversation with her just last night.
Right up until last night I was beginning to worry that I had been left hanging. (Something which has happened more than once in my blogging career.) And due to my reticence to badger this person or pursue her more aggressively, as a trained journalist might do, I sort of let things slide.
Ultimately I came to believe that I had somehow blown it and that I might not get the really gritty stuff that I had been promised.
In response I started to construct a post of the information that she had already shared with me over lunch that day at The Outback, and in text messages and e-mails afterward.
So I wrote up most of that, picking through it carefully so that it would not reveal her identity (The one journalistic trait that IS firmly part of my DNA is that I NEVER burn a source.), only to realize that there was no way to trim it down to the point where the Palins themselves would not be able to figure out who I must be talking to. Or at least narrow it down to a handful of suspects.
So I decided that I simply could not write the post without letting her know that she might be outed, even if I didn't mention her by name.
After I sent that e-mail I received this one back in response:
Not opposed at all to working with you- just got busy it's the crazy time of year for me! What do you need? I'm Not focused on them right now- work has my undivided attention.After that we had several e-mail conversations back and forth, and last night we talked on the phone for forty plus minutes where she assured me that she is still gung-ho to get her story out there and is also committed to coming out publicly so that the Palins cannot simply dismiss it as based on anonymous sources. (Which by the way is great news, as she was not sure about that earlier.)
There is one hitch however, and that is that though she is determined to reveal her identity, she wants to wait until after a certain legal issue has been sorted out.
She also explained some of the things that she has been dealing with and by comparison the blog post is simply not as important as the other real life things that she currently has on her plate. (As it turned out I was only one of several people who she was not responding to while dealing with her difficulties.)
So what we agreed to is for me to go ahead and publish that post that I was working on before (The one with the information from our previous conversations.), and keep her identity secret enough so that Palin supporters cannot track her down and start harassing her (Though as I said the Palins will still likely have a pretty fair idea who is talking to me.), and then continue to post new information based on conversations we will have moving forward, as well as photos and documents that she will share, until finally she is in a place where she feels comfortable in stepping completely out of the shadows.
That first post, as somebody already guessed earlier, will show up Monday.
And what can you expect from that post, and the ones that will follow?
Drinking, drug use, family fights, dark secrets, and "I don't know whose baby that is, but it is NOT Sarah's."
