Well, I expected my last post might be controversial, but I had no idea …
Actually, I kinda thought I’d instantly persuade people with my arguments. Ha! Fat chance. It was interesting, though. Jeffrey was no doubt correct when he wrote, “Do not underestimate your readers.” The blogosphere is a pretty amazing aggregator of disparate knowledge.
It was time-consuming, but I think people respected that I took the time to listen to all their complaints and respond publicly. I there might be a lesson there for Sarah Boxer, Corey Pein, Nick Coleman and other journalists enduring the wrath of the blogosphere. In the past, I think journalists have tried to maintain a stately silence – but those days are gone. Readers nowadays want interactivity. They’re much more inclined to believe the worst if you don’t explain yourself.
Speaking of Pein, he has an interesting little tidbit on his website:
Big response to my article on the coverage of the CBS scandal. Now CJR answers its correspondents. However, their “representative sample” omits the letters that simply called me an asshole and left it at that.
The best letter in the batch begins:
“You people obviously still don’t get it, but you will soon. This movement is bigger than the left’s domination of the universities, the newspapers, and the film industry; it’s bigger than anything that has occurred since you wormed into power in the 1960’s.”
I’m inclined to agree.
Derek,
You’re a good man. Hey, listen, I think we need to have people embedded with reporters. I’ve had to look high and low for good stories and insights from reporters talking about what it’s really like working with other journalists.
John F. Burns, of course, lowered his sawed-off shotgun and blasted with both barrels in that in-your-face piece he wrote about some of his colleagues in Iraq.
Evan Wright, in his Generation Kill, records an amazing little piece of fisticuffs before the war:
>War fever, at least among the reproters, has been running pretty high. Before coming to Kuwait, while staying at the main media hangout hotel by the Navy’s port in Bahrain, I’d witnessed two colleagues get into a smackdown in the lobby over the issue of war and peace. A Canadian wire-service reporter, bitterly opposed to the war, knocked down a loudly patriotic American photographer in favor ot it. While stunned Arab security guards looked on, the Canadian peacenik clenched the American patriot into a sort of LAPD chokehold and repeatedly slammed his head into the back of a chair (Wright, 15).
Heh heh. Man, you gotta love it. A Canadian anti-war peacenik getting ALL AGGRO Clockwork-Orange style on the photographer’s head!
And the peacenik was sending back UNBIASED reports, I’m sure.
Anyway, I call for fulltime CITIZENS trained in journalism to be PERMANENTLY EMBEDDED with the reporters while they, among other things, “goatfuck” stories, to use Jon Lee Anderson’s rather venal metaphor.
BTW, Wright’s Generation Kill is hands-down the best up-close and personal story written by a journalist in Iraq. The others are not even close.
*
Derek,
An article on the recent conference at Harvard on the media and blogging. It seems to correspond with some of your thoughts (and mine).
*
I wish I had some good stories (about what it’s like working with other journalists). Nothing like what you mention, that’s for sure! Really, I’d be happy to have someone “embedded” with me (maybe not permanently…), but more to let them see what the job is really like and that we’re not all Satan-worshipping America-haters.
I mean, really, I know Iraq is a huge hot-button issue … but in the last couple weeks I’ve reported on an upstate murder of a 7-year-old, a firefighter killed in the line of duty (also here) an insensitive advertisement (“special tsunami fares!”), school kids getting hurt on an escalator, Delta chopping fares, Angelina Jolie, an owl in Central Park, a deadly fire, a savage box-cutter attack, a woman raising money for her cancer-striken son on eBay, another deadly fire, a couple of odd studies (here and here), and a court decision allowing cops to use GPS tracking on cars without a warrant. For the most part, not exactly the kinda stuff that’s going to inspire partisan outrage!
Derek,
Ha ha. Yeah, I see your point. It’s an awfully difficult challenge for the Devious, Politically-Biased Roving Reporter to try to spin or slant the story about the OWL in Central Park. Maybe a Real Pro like Seymour Hersh could bang out an expose on the owl, don’t ya think?
Okay, maybe that embedding idea is a bad one. You’re suggestng it might be far more boring than an average citizen could stand, right? Probably have to spend some cool cash to get someone to follow you guys around. Hm. Satan-worshipping America-haters? No, no, we only think that about reporters on the coasts. Between the coasts, journalism is an honorable profession. Heh heh.
*
Derek,
>It may not have been romantic, but they did it for science.
>A group of 166 men suffering from premature ejaculation repeatedly had sex with women who were timing them with stopwatches.
>Those taking an experimental new drug showed a newfound stamina: three minutes – up from one.
>And hey, guys, don’t laugh. That’s more than most of you, sexperts say.
>”In the movies, everyone lasts for about 20 minutes. In real life it’s about 2-1/2 minutes,” said Dr. Mark Stein, a urologist at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Manhattan.
>Now those couples’ sacrifice for science could lead to a new treatment for premature ejaculation.
Now I KNOW you weren’t chuckling over your keyboard on this article.
Hey, BTW, are all of the articles you write put into the print edition? Are all articles put into the digital edition? What’s the current policy?
*
DO NOT MOCK THE OWL STORY! (I got enough of that in the office!)
I had fun with that story. Blogged about it here and here. Nature can be pretty neat – so are these subcultures that motivate people to do things the rest of us would consider “odd” (like flying across the country for a day to see an owl).
The job isn’t necessarily boring — especially when you’re at some fire or the like — but I think it would be for folks looking for partisan bias…
Everyone in the office had a good laugh about that premature ejaculation story … blogged about it here. I wish they had let me use the lede I wanted!
That Frank Bajak tech column was interesting, thanks. Virtually all of the stories in the print edition make the web site, although I’ve noticed occasionally they miss stories in the late editions.
Also — you may already know about this — but the best low-effort way to keep an eye on journalism controversies from the perspective of reporters is via the Poynter Institute‘s Romenesko letters. (I sometimes post there). Currently people are actually debating your buddy Seymour Hersh — whose work I really respect, btw. But Jules Crittenden, a Boston Herald reporter of whom I’m also a fan, has a scathing letter on Hersh.