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New York, 7:42 PM
Tue Dec 8
47 posts in the last 24 hours
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08/05/09
Sometimes I think that "neutral" reporting is useful not only for moral reasons but for practical ones -- even if a lot of people think the press are a bunch of biased bastards, at least people know that the Post, for example, is going to just report the things that happen, for the most part, without making fun of their subjects. If they did make fun of their subjects -- no matter how deserving they might be -- the people who most deserve to be made fun of would never agree to talk to them again.
Ira Glass is awesome and all, but I don't know that a newsroom full of proto-Jon Stewarts is the answer. We go to the Daily Show for awesome commentary, but I wouldn't trust them to break news -- because the only people who will talk to them at this point are morons who somehow have still never seen the Daily Show, and people who are in on the joke.
08/05/09
And Sacha Baron Cohen is an excellent example. He's already seeing diminishing returns: One real fault of BRUNO is that he clearly couldn't get nearly as much good shit as he did in BORAT, because a lot of people recognized him. He only got that footage in National Guard headquarters because all the cadets, who recognized him, were not allowed to talk to their superior officers without being addressed by them first.
08/05/09
So while I can see your point about playing straight news stories, well, straight, I don't think it applies to features like Shapira's. Lots of publications and outlets have made a proud tradition of getting people to talk to them even though it's probably not in their best interest. (See: The Daily Show convincing Bill Keller to go on air.) To borrow James Poniewozik's line: "That's not to say it can't be done; but it's harder than what either the Post or Gawker did."
Oh, and sorry about the AlisaBuffer random-name-generator thing, Dan. Maybe consider keeping it as your porn name?
08/04/09
Entertainment is... well, entertaining. And I love The Daily Show as much as the next self-important Gen X/Yer or whatever, but people who get their news ONLY from TDS (or Gawker sites) are as informed as people who get their news only from Fox.
The WP has a point.
08/04/09
The Style section was actually founded by Ben Bradlee to do just that, and did it better than anyone for decades. Now the new Exec Ed Branchuli is said not to "get" the Style section and actually wants to kill it.
That will be the cause of death of The Washington Post: suicide.
08/04/09
08/04/09
But the content is sort of irrelevant, too. Go look at washingtonpost.com. Fifteen years the Internet's been a popular medium, and that site is still a fucking newspaper written in HTML. You got your section heads, your big type on the headline at the top of the page, one piece of art (ooooh, though, it changes). And then you click on that big headline and it takes you to a fucking login page.
I have been a huge fan of newspapers for so long; I feel really lucky to get to write for what I think is a pretty great weekly right now. But it's bittersweetly satisfying to watch some of these reporters and editors rage, rage against the dying of the fucking light, because no matter what they say or do, they are done for, just like the buggy-whip makers. And it's a lot easier to watch self-absorbed, petulantly pathetic villains go down than helplessly suffering unsung heroes.
(There are a lot of great reporters, photographers, and editors who don't deserve the shaft they're getting as the industry collapses -- more of them, I'm sure, than there are whiners like Shapira's boss. My personal sense, based on purely anecdotal evidence, is that their opinions and ideas have largely been disregarded in favor of bullshit like attacking blogs and Gannett's rebranding of newsrooms as "information centers.")
08/04/09
Sometimes I think that "neutral" reporting is useful not only for moral reasons but for practical ones -- even if a lot of people think the press are a bunch of biased bastards, at least people know that the Post, for example, is going to just report the things that happen, for the most part, without making fun of their subjects. If they did make fun of their subjects -- no matter how deserving they might be -- the people who most deserve to be made fun of would never agree to talk to them again.
Ira Glass's idea of a newsroom full of Jon Stewarts is telling -- we depend on Jon Stewart for excellent commentary, but as the years go by, fewer and fewer people are going to agree to go on the Daily Show.
08/04/09
However, I imagine this is a problem Allen Funt and Sacha Baron Cohen have both dealt with before.
08/03/09
Boy if I were a newspaper editor, and I were totally incompetent in the area of New Media, I'd phone up my reporter and give him a good talking to. And if I were that reporter, I'd be a big fat dumb pussy and just bla bla bla bla.
Idiots.
08/03/09
THAT editor? I don't know.
08/03/09
There's no evidence people like to read Mr. Spock accounts, quite the contrary. On important factual news, robotic, sterile editorial sensibilities are justified. Nowhere else. The Internet is proving newspaper editors were simply wrong, for years. A tiny range of opinion and perspective were allowed, and they weren't even in the paper's economic interest, nor did they represent dispassionate high-mindedness. Since when is suffering fools gladly virtuous? Gawker, for instance, does slummin' celebrity crap and snobby high-mindedness interchangeably. The argument about degrading discourse is for suckers of the kind who shrieked hysterically at blood in movies, or sexy passages from novels, or devil references in rock and roll.
08/03/09
As a current professional dominatrix, however, I also realize that one tree can have many branches. I don't try and tell escorts how to handle their business better by doing more like I do, and I don't see how telling newspapers to write like bloggers is going to benefit them either. Reporter journalism is tough stuff and getting the story right isn't easy either (even if you're not Alessandra Stanley). Maybe if Hamilton had found this lady's website on his own he could've written the same blog post but maybe because Shapira did sit through her two hour seminar, he had food for actual thought, not just derision.
08/03/09
"Where's your outrage, man?"
He might as well have added, "Humbug!"
08/03/09
08/03/09
“Stop being boring” is food for thought, a free lunch, the meat of it.
08/03/09
08/03/09
Hell--would you have picked up the St. Petersburgh Times today?
Don't be afraid of gift horses bearing inbound web traffic in the mouth or some other tortured metaphor
08/03/09
I know it's inevitable and part of your mission to do this. However when you're doing this you have a non-MSM-media obligation to move the story fwd in as many cases as possible.
Which in the easy majority of cases you don't really do in any meaningful way. At least in my opinion.
I would add that this post comes off a little shrill whereas Shapira's article, essay, whatever was funny and even a little self-deprecating. To the point that even non-MSM-sympathizing readers were nodding their heads a little. (As a reference point I was facebooked, twittered, emailed, Google-shared, and otherwise interwebbed the link by over a dozen people over the weekend.)
08/03/09
Jack, you needn't be reluctant to call the summarizing "mindless" because Gabe implies as much in the following (empasis supplied):
"Blogs are killing newspapers. But it's not by mindlessly cutting and pasting from newspaper web sites. Gawker would go out of business if that's allwe did."
08/03/09
08/03/09
08/04/09
It was unfriendly of me to misspell "emphasis," and I apologize to English, but English and I are actually getting along better today than English and you, I think. Mindless cutting and pasting is not all Gawker does, wrote Gabe. I agree! I am a fan. But I am also tempted to agree with Gabe's implication, no doubt unintentional, that mindless cutting and pasting is however one of the things Gawker does, even though it is not all Gawker does.
08/04/09
I have zero agenda and read you regularly -- !!! -- but I think I'll stand happily and confidently by my suggestion that Gawker seems to be doing more summary (I won't call it mindless cutting and pasting -- it's more than that!) than maybe you once did, or would like to think you do, without generating that "new information."
I also will stand by my statement that Gabe's post was pretty shrill -- and overly defensive -- particularly if you look at it alongside Shapira's opinion piece. Which, whatever you think of the merits of its thesis, was a pretty civil and reasonable piece of writing.