I love a good rip job, and commenter “lttl” gets off a terrific stream of rips while responding to Strib Guild officer Pam Miller’s post lamenting the loss of so much talent from her newsroom. Clearly “lttl” places far less value on the Twin Cities’ primary news source.
Here’s a sample:
“Ford, NWA, local govt, countless others, all gave good paying jobs to folks trying to make a better life for their kids — pull them up the ladder. Lots of those jobs are gone thanks to the “invisible hand” and I pray for them every night.
“Very few of the Strib refugees fall into that bucket. Other than the fabled Phone Ladies of Lileks’ fame and lore, aren’t the displaced all (a) educated, (b) degreed, and (c) skilled people? In other words, why should I give a crap about some overeducated dilettante who went into journalism viewing him(her)self as some ascetic purveyor of The Truth?
“It’s a load of CRAP. Sid Hartman, Kate Parry, Kersten, Coleman, Lileks, CJ, Lambert — good luck to you all and I’ll give you a buck when I see you under the 94 viaduct. You chose your Craft (hence the ‘Guild’). Your product lacked quality and could be found in abundance at higher quality and less (in most instances, no) cost. I can hear Sid’s babbling about Close Personal Friends for free every morning on the Good Geriatric Neighbor. Anything Kersten has to say is available from a variety of pablum packers online or over the air and the same with Coleman. I can get Lileks from bubble gum wrappers, fortune cookies, online and from my fillings if I’m too close to an old AM radio. And CJ? When I get so addled that I (a) give a crap about local spray-ons or (b) need her to tell me about them, I’ll just stick my withered gonads into a bag of rabid weasels and go out on a high note.
“At least she didn’t get run off by a second-rate backwater newspaper and a Clear Channel intern project. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
I shouldn’t laugh. But, come on, there’s some pretty funny stuff in there. Except for that last crack. What a mongrel bastard!
I draw attention to “lttl’s” comments because his attitude is palpable around town, and not just from talk radio chowderheads who see “liberal bias” behind every sports score and think Glenn Beck is the last honest man standing. I suspect “lttl” has a personal issue or two with some or all of us mentioned. Maybe we dismissed him in a story somewhere back in time, or maybe CJ DIDN’T quote him at a Vikings Celebrity Dinner. In my experience it doesn’t take much to make glib, cranky people wish most of us a wet cardboard box and a week at the Dorothy Day Center.
But while there is something to his shots at the implausibly lofty regard some of us have for our “craft” — so high we expect other middle-class workers, people who have been jacked around for years by what we’ll broadly call “market pressures” to take special pity on the spectre of us … US! … losing our cult-ish standing and being forced to face life as Wal-Mart greeters, or worse, Bloomington zoning commission reporters — “lttl” makes a big leap and a fundamental mistake in asserting that a breadth and depth of information-gathering equal to newspapers is already up and readily available on the web.
Hey “lttl”! Here’s a news flash for your rabid weasels. It isn’t. Not yet anyway. Maybe in a couple years. But not now. Almost all those links on The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report come from journalists somewhere, and every day there are fewer and fewer of them … and fewer still who are doing reporting of any “linkable” relevance. Sure, you can dial up looney tunes wing-nut stuff like NewsMax and call it “journalism” or “facts” without that arrogant “higher calling” crap. But that sort of thing really is the difference between a deep-fried Snickers bar and regular helpings of peas and carrots.
Before the nutjobs on either end of the spectrum do their spin thing, somebody has to make a few phone calls, visit a few people in person, check out the lay of the land and write a more or less straight report about what just happen. As newspapers wither — and they are withering, I’m not being hysterical about that, less will not be more — there are far fewer people with far less resources to make those calls, visit the sites of the incident and suss out what most likely went down.
(By the way, with all the attention on the Strib in recent days, we haven’t paid much attention to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a.k.a that “second-rate backwater newspaper” across the river. Before anyone goes all delusional about MediaNews’ more-enlightened-than-Avista commitment to community service, do yourself a favor and read this piece chronicling the skeletal coverage MediaNews is offering the San Francisco Bay Area.
In it, one veteran MediaNews editor who recently bailed says this about his “craft”:
“The newspaper business I got involved in, some say it’s dying. I say it’s dead. The last 10 years of my career has been hospice care.”
Newspapers are fair game for a lot of ripping. There is plenty of arrogance to spare in the average newsroom. A lot of it of the, “How dare you criticize me!” sort. The average second, third and fourth-rate papers are grossly over-mediated and god-awfully dull, not to mention baffling in their love of redundancy. But stale as they have allowed themselves to become, they are still the only people doing the dusty grunt work of talking to strangers, victims, witnesses and objective experts .
In some ways those who remain at daily newspapers are like the “illegal immigrants” so much in the news these days. They’re doing the work nobody else wants to do. If you look at it that way, that arrogance of special-ness and reproach-proof “craft” loses a lot of its luster.
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