It's All A Stunt!

I don't know when I first heard of "Stunt Journalism", but the phrase finally registered with me a few months ago when I read Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. At one point, Gretchen was feeling melancholy about the whole deal, especially when she found out her presumably-original idea actually had a whole genre already, and that maybe she wasn't as original as she thought. (Other recently mentioned examples of stunt journalism are Eric Brende's Better Off and Vanessa Farquharson's Green as a Thistle. Then there's The Today's Show's Where in the World is Matt Lauer?.)

Source.

It probably helps that unlike Gretchen, I'm not already a published writer with an editor waiting for the results of my experiment. I be but a simple narcissistic blogger, as it were. But when I read the phrase "stunt journalism" and realised that it's exactly the sort of thing I like to read, my reaction was not "Meh. Everybody's doing it," but "Oooh! Great idea! I want one! What kind of stunt can I do?" Yes, while there are many bandwagons that I avoid, there are others that I not only leap onto, but relentlessly chase down first.

The only problem left for me, then, was to decide what my stunt would be. While an all-out green living onslaught, à la Colin or Vanessa, sounded appealing, I think I have about all the green living one marriage can take at the moment. I flirted with the idea of doing a from-scratch cooking series, kind of a Julie & Julia thing, minus the expensive ingredients and the masses of butter and the lobster-killing. But the internet is crawling with foodie blogs, by actual foodies (like my classmate Natalie over at The First Kitchen), not people like me who will eat anything if it's covered in enough salsa or chocolate, and don't really care about the taste of anything else. I had pretty much decided on doing a tour of Austin's locally owned cafés and trailers, seeing what kind of greasy food could be gotten on a low budget, but that plan was contingent upon me getting a summer job. Six weeks and as many "thank-you-for-applying-but" emails later, the café plan has been abandoned.

Finally, it came to me. I'm already a fairly tremendous fan of our local bus service, which gets me around and has allowed me to meet all sorts of people. I'm already documenting my car-free life a bit. So, for my first foray into stunt journalism, I shall use and abuse Capital Metro. I'll ride all the routes. I'll see all the sights that are in reach of public transportation. I might just make their PR person tear out her hair when I start tweeting about the good and the bad of my journeys with them. And you can read all about it here, starting this Wednesday and continuing until I run out of places to go (but definitely before the end of the year-- I don't want this challenge to go on forever). When I told Chad about this plan, he immediately said, "I was thinking of doing that, too!" So, he's in, with a brand-new CapMetro Regional Pass that allows him onto the trains and express buses (instead of his normal, boring pass).

Do you like stunt journalism? Do you think this is another sign I've lost my mind? Is there somewhere in Austin that you'd like me to go to and write about?