Smith: Santa Rosa man wins trip with New York Times columnist

Austin Meyer scores big. Again.

Not even four months ago, he netted the goal that won Stanford the Pac-12 soccer championship. Now the Santa Rosa native and journalism grad student has come out on top of Nicholas Kristof’s “Win-a-Trip” contest.

This is so huge. Later this year, Meyer, 23, will travel with Kristof and work alongside the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner as he exposes stories in the developing world.

“We’ll probably travel to India and Bangladesh, although Congo is an alternate possibility,” Kristof wrote in the Times column announcing that he and the Center for Global Development chose Meyer “from a dazzling field of 450 applicants.”

While on his trip, Meyer, a 2010 graduate of Maria Carrillo High and the youngest of three sons of Roy and Pam Meyer of Santa Rosa, will blog for the New York Times website and appear in videos with Kristof.

The op-ed columnist has treated exceptional students to overseas reporting adventures since 2006. “The aim is to generate interest in global poverty issues,” Kristof has said.

“For me, the trip tends to be an excuse to write about development issues that tend to get neglected because there’s never a time peg: they don’t ?happen on a particular day, but every day.”

HBO produced a documentary, “Reporter,” from his 2007 win-a-trip journey to Congo.

Meyer applied for the honor of shadowing Kristof late last year. About a week ago, his cell phone rang and he saw it was a call from New York. He swears, “I did not in any way put it together” with his application to the columnist’s contest.

The caller said, “This is Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times.” Meyer, who shines not only as a soccer player but as a musician and improv performer, blurted, “Oh, my gosh!”

“I was speechless,” he said from Palo Alto. “I just collapsed to my knees.”

Kristof can’t yet say when they will leave the country for a no-frills, journalistic foray to somewhere far away. “I’m willing to go tomorrow,” Meyer said.

He’ll use whatever preparation time he has to hone his reporting and writing skills, and to contemplate how to pack for a trip to someplace so different from what he’s ever known that this might as well be on another planet.

His limited international travel has taken him to comfortable, predictable destinations in France and Costa Rica.

“Which is why I want to do this,” Meyer said.

“I can’t wait.”

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HORSES? IN COMPTON? Sonoma County-reared Brett Fallentine is hard at it in South Central LA, making a film that he intends will not only tell a great story but help to sustain an endangered way of life and alternative to street gangs.

Fallentine is a 1999 Montgomery grad who studied film at Cal and USC. He’s now working on “Fire on the Hill: The Story of the Compton Cowboys.”

The full-length documentary will feature the urban equestrians who ride in that crime-oppressed part of the Southland and try keep young people out of trouble by introducing them to horses and the training corral.

“It makes more sense for something like this to exist there than anywhere else,” said Fallentine, who was surprised to discovered that the Western, equine tradition runs deep in and near Compton.

He found also that the tradition and the option to gangs is at risk of extinction, largely because of the 2012 fire that destroyed The Hill, an already besieged stables in Athens, just outside of Compton. Sensing the making of his film is urgent, he’s gone onto Kickstarter to seek donations to help cover production costs.

You can check out his appeal at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/394207746/fire-on-the-hill-the-story-of-the-compton-cowboys.“

“The end goal is not the film,” Fallentine said from LA.

He said he and his partners in the docuproject want to raise awareness about the value of the horse culture in greater Compton, and perhaps to help make it stronger.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.