Tag Archives: Into the Wild

“Into the Wild” : A journalism classic revisited

By Christopher B. Daly 

As usual, I’m using the summer to catch up on my reading. Here’s a look back by Jon Krakauer, revisiting his break-out work on the death of Christopher McCandless, which became the basis for Krakauer’s best-seller Into the Wild. Krakauer makes a good case about the scientific validity of his original hypothesis — that McCandless died from ingesting wild foods that poisoned him.

This piece points up the importance of something we do too rarely in journalism — that is, stop chasing the next thing for a moment and go back over the ground we have already plowed. We should test and validate our work more often than we do.

So, kudos to Krakauer for both the original and the look-back.

Chris McCandless, the subject of "Into the Wild"

Chris McCandless, the subject of “Into the Wild”

4 Comments

Filed under Journalism, journalism history