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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

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Transcript

Question: How do you maintain your journalistic integrity without burning so many bridges that you can’t get the story?

Matt Taibbi: That is problem that every journalist has to worry about. I think in my case I have a little bit of a luxury that other journalists don’t have, which is that I'm not covering the same people over and over and over again. If I want to, I can cover a story and move onto a completely different topic afterwards and never have to deal with any of those people again. So I can actually do that scorch and burn thing where I descend on a whole bunch of people and write whatever I want about them, and if it’s not flattering I don’t ever have to talk to them again.

That is not the situation that some journalists are in. If you’re covering the White House for the Washington Post, well you have to nurture those relationships and you can’t burn people all the time. So I venture a little bit more in the direction of just saying what I think is appropriate and letting the chips fall where they may, but at the same time you have to be fair to your sources, otherwise no one will ever talk to you. If you get a reputation of somebody who violates off-the-record privileges for instance no one is going to talk to you, so I work hard to be honest with my sources, but I don’t go out of my way to make them feel good either.

Recorded on November 22, 2010
Interviewed by Andrew Dermont
Directed by Jonathan Fowler
Produced by Elizabeth Rodd