On Veterans Day, when Americans are apt to take an expansive view of their freedoms and the role of their armed forces in securing them, The New York Times ran an article calling into question the commitment of one sitting Supreme Court justice to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee who is considered a staunch First Amendment defender, addressed an assembly on October 28th at the tony Dalton School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  The talk was covered by the student newspaper, The Daltonian.  The judge’s staff insisted that he be able to pre-approve the resulting article, and the school complied with this demand.

(Note: This is part of an ongoing journal of Sproing’s experience as a mite on the sickly hide of that dying beast, Old Media.)

Once upon a time
Somebody say to me
What is your Conceptual Continuity?
Well, I told him right then
It should be easy to see
The crux of the biscuit
Is the Apostrophe.

In the words of that other site which was once the wellspring of our snark: And now it’s dead.

I’ve been waiting for the death rattle for some time — years now, ever since I got into the print media business, back when there was no free mass public alternative. Old-form journalism has been hemorrhaging from its thousand external cuts and various self-inflicted wounds since before I joined the game. Now — finally, sadly — the blood loss has choked the higher functions, and Old Media has forgotten the name of its spouse and the need for pants.

There’s a misplaced apostrophe in The New Yorker.

(Note: This is part of an ongoing journal of Sproing’s experience as a mite on the sickly hide of that dying beast, Old Media.)

It’s nice to have water piped in from a reservoir that doesn’t have corpses floating in it; to have warmth generated by something other than peat I cut myself from the neighboring bog; to travel by a road free of ruts and rapine-minded highwaymen. Yes, very nice, these utilities that I only notice when my kitchen tap runs brown for half a day, or the power bill goes up, or I get stuck in traffic.

Also nice: getting the news of the day delivered straight to my eyeballs, by whatever conveyance. I need not gather in the square to have the baron’s approved dispatches bellowed at me; I can instead consume news wherever I like, with reasonable confidence that it hasn’t been red-pencilled by a self-interested governing authority.

The Washington Post is featuring an opinion piece with the intriguing headline The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition) that explains how evil liberal media reporters, undoubtedly whilst sitting on big beanbags full of moneys and smoking hashish, put in hours of work to write articles that are then picked up by blogs like Gawker, which then make money off the content they never really generated to begin with.

If you’re anything like me, you read the acknowledgments,  pay attention until all of the credits have rolled, and regularly check your newspaper for admissions of past errors.  The New York Times regularly posts corrections when they misspell the middle name of an article’s  photographer, or the name of the town in which an unindicted co-conspirator attended high school.

The Times demonstrated its commitment to accuracy on Saturday by printing the following:

An article in some editions on Wednesday about the disappearance, and safe return, of an elderly Manhattan woman with Alzheimer’s misstated the frequency of her son’s visits from his home in New Jersey. The son, William Zengel, visits his mother, Betty Zengel, about twice a week, not once a month.

Daphne Merkin penned an article essentially calling Bernie Madoff’s victims saps – without mentioning that her brother was implicated in the scandal for allegedly defrauding investors of over $2 billion that he funneled Madoff’s way.  The Times dithered over whether to clarify her obvious conflict of interest.  Times editors were aware of the egregiously high error rate  in Jayson Blair’s articles for more than 3 years before his plagiarism and fabrications finally brought him down.

But the Times will not let stand the implication that a boy doesn’t love his mama.

Image via blog.pentagram.com.

I love a good prank. I’m still laughing at the one I pulled off a couple of days ago, when I hacked into Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Twitter account (#supremleader) and started writing stuff like “electn reslts so bogus dudez. will totes go 4 rcount mabes. cant w8 4 twilight2!!!1!” and then AP picked up on it, interviewed me by Yahoo! Messenger and I was like “noes, AP – iz real aytolla frm Irn and i thinkz amadadadajahd iz lame and lettrman iz teh innocentz!! “.

(Note: This is part of an ongoing journal of Sproing’s experience as a mite on the sickly hide of that dying beast, Old Media.)

Welcome to journalism! Unless you have that rare gift for letting your love and your hate ooze around the corners of the stuff you write, you will never be allowed to express an opinion again. Anywhere. Not even on your own lawn.

April 29, 2009

6       GOINGS ON BEYOND YOUR PRICE RANGE

19     THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Where did all the Cartier ads go?; socialite jabber so unfiltered as to appear fictional; sure, NOW James Surowiecki tells us.

David Remnick    24     LETTER FROM RUSSIA

The Motherland

I should just move the magazine here.

(Note: This is part of an ongoing journal of Sproing’s experience as a mite on the sickly hide of that dying beast, Old Media.)

Hey, all you people reading this! You know what I totally fucking hate? Readers.

Practically every day that my newspaper publishes a piece of my work, I spend the morning in a pre-emptive cringe. If the phone rings unexpectedly, I find an excuse to be away checking my mail slot or taking a dump. Because in the final assessment I am just a fry cook, and someone, somewhere along the way, is going to believe that I loogied in his burger.

I’m an acolyte of the Italo Calvino model of communication — that a story is incomplete, just so much potential energy, without a reader plugged into the circuit. But my guess is that Calvino never had Mrs. Henry Meltzer, subscriber at 3 Willowcrest Circle, dementia-dialing him at 6:45 a.m. to correct a comma splice or demand to know why he didn’t print the entire text of John McCain’s speech to the Tukwila VFW. If on a winter’s night a traveler would’ve been a whole different trip with Mrs. Meltzer cracking the spine.

The blade began its descent on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s still falling. We all filed into the empty space where an ancient Linotype press had roared and spit out our newspaper twenty years earlier, before it was replaced with a sleeker off-site model.

Some of us were about to be similarly decommissioned, but nothing, least of all something newer or more efficient, would take our places. Eight percent cuts, they told us, so a handful of workers at our small newspaper could either step forward and volunteer for a severance package, or be forcibly laid off with the same benefits. A more generous offer, on the whole, than a lot of staffers in our industry were receiving.

We had until Thursday to decide.

In the first part of a 374 part series, Wordsmoker “If I Only Had A Heart” looks into the past, present and future of journalism…

The Future Of News (and a little bit of history)

Opinion, perspective, point of view: all those things that are the opposite of so-called objectivity were always part of the news except for the period from the invention of the railroads and the telegraph to just about, oh, the late 20th century.