“Old Farts” vs. Bloggers
His excuses, basically, were (1) “It was the greatest feeling: Blogging. Vrooooom! An idea struck me and with nary a thought I had posted it on the Internet,” because, you know, that’s what the Internet is – “You just type and–vroooooom!!–lights out, baby.” And (2) Desperation from going four weeks as one of the Los Angeles media site L.A Observed’s basically foreign-to-the-form stable of “bloggers,” with not even the glimmer of an idea for a post. These essays are grouped at L.A. Observed under its Native Intelligence section.
Some background here: L.A. Observed is a Los Angeles media blog run by former L.A. Timesman Kevin Roderick who, like Bob Baker, is not terribly fond of irreverence directed at his former employer. L.A. Observed provides valuable media news, which is why every media person I know checks it regularly, although I’ve spent far less time there since Roderick cut out the comments.
I don’t know anyone who clicks on the Native Intelligence pieces (unless, as in the Bob Baker case, it seems horrifically interesting and Roderick brings it to our notice). That’s not to say no one ever does, but it hardly strikes me as that blog’s strongest element.
I’d say that if it takes you a month to think of an idea for a blogging post you probably shouldn’t be blogging – or maybe even reporting or editing, at least not for the sorts of salaries they pay you at the Times, where indeed you can make a nice living while being almost completely bereft of ideas. That’s why I’m less sympathetic than many at the cost-cutting standoff going on now between the Tribune Company and its sometimes bloated L.A. outpost.
But maybe that’s me, and I admit this opinion may be flavored my general prejudice against writing coaches, which Baker was at the Times and now is on a freelance basis. From his own site: “Helping you is my calling. Getting there is your job.” Oh, dear. Journalists who want to help always strike me as better suited to social work or something, and unfortunately their earnest attitudes are one of the mainstream media’s biggest problems now in dealing with the rude new world of Internet journalism.
I speculated about all this on my blog, which brought a comment from Bob Baker himself, who accused me (among other things) of having a “junior high schoolish” blogs vs. old farts world-view. He did, to his credit, own up to being an “old fart” in his mea culpa in L.A. Observed’s Native Intelligence section.
But I mean, Jeez, I’ve never gone four weeks (or even four days) without an idea about anything. I admit posting here has been somewhat light lately, but I just got out of the hospital and my energy has been pretty low. I hope that if my ideas ever sink to the level that I imagine I’m writing satire when I’m not, I hope someone saves me from myself.
The reason Bob Baker wasn’t so saved, he explained in his second Native Intelligence post, was because he no longer works at the L.A. Times newsroom, that wonderful place “where you can ask a podmate to stand up, look at your screen and offer a quick verdict on your lead.”
Newsroom experience has its advantages, I agree, but these tend to involve reporting than writing. I’ve spent a few years in newsrooms myself, and while I’m sure I irritated colleagues there in various ways, at least I never was one of those people who make a habit of popping up like jack-in-the-boxes, heads craning over the next “pods” to bug their fellow “podmates” for their opinions.
I guess, therefore, I’m what Baker would classify in the first category of his theory that “there are only two kinds of journalists – bad ones, and those who are improving.” On the other hand, the last time I worked in a newsroom, we had desks rather than those insurance company-style “podules.”
I do like to think I’ve improved at least somewhat lately, but not from asking other writers their opinion of my pieces before I’ve finished them.
Anyway, Bob Baker wrote in my blog comments that “those of you who pride yourself on making sense of a crazy world know, if you read my piece, that it’s more complex than portrayed by C.S. Then again, most things are.”
Chop! One of Baker’s friends wrote in several times to defend him, so I should explain that L.A. Observed has some excellent writers in its Native Intelligence section — David Rensin, Denise Hamilton, and uh…well I hope “some” will take care of at least a few hurt feelings… but: what they are doing there is ill-suited to blogging, and I don’t really think it’s cruel to point out that these mostly long, untimely essays would be better read on paper, at leisure in a coffee-shop, for instance, rather than at a computer monitor.
Some of blogging’s important elements include: regular and frequent posting, interactivity with readers, reaction and commentary to mainstream media news, links proving one’s point, and so on. You can get away with weakness in some of these areas if others are strong enough. But some perfectly fine journalists are just not bloggers, they don’t really get the Internet, and therein lies the basic problem facing newspapers today.
I readily cop to “junior-highschoolish” snarkiness, thus my ingrained antipathy to writing coaches, and indeed to anyone with that kind of hall monitor mentality. I suppose a certain immaturity is probably an asset when it comes to blogging.
But congratulations to Bob Baker for “making sense of this crazy world”! I hope he continues to enjoy that prideful feeling at having figured it all out, because I’ve certainly never managed that particular feat myself.
PajamasMedia Special Correspondent CATHERINE SEIPP writes the weekly “From the Left Coast” column for National Review Online, a monthly column for Independent Women’s Forum and freelances other places, such as the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal op-ed pages. She previously wrote columns for: Buzz, Mediaweek, UPI, New York Press and Salon. Her work has also appeared in Reason, Penthouse, TV Guide, the National Post and Forbes.
As a sometime journalist who has gotten in trouble for assuming that my blog was more privayte thn it turned out to be, I have some sympathy with baker—though mine is just a JournalSpace page with a verifiable audience of about four. LA Observed is a bit more high profile. Then too, the fact reported by LYT that what Baker published was an old Lenny Bruce routine seems, if true, to be a fairly important aspoect of the story. If Baker indeed simply reprinted a monologue by a performer who used to be regarded as a saint of free speech, only to be excoriated for it, that tells us something about how times have changed since the early 1960s—and probably not for the better. That he felt obligated to aplogize abjectly, and not even for himslef but for Lenny, is just the icing on the cake.
Speaking upon these changing times; in Baker’s reprint he feels only one ethnic group needs the consideration of using asterisks in place of the derogatory original. I guess spics, kikes and wops no longer have the captacity to be stung by hateful words.
Pushing seventy, we remain exremely prolific… compose well thought-of lyrics and music (ask, we’ll tell), produce informed and (dare we say) literate blog comments on topics ranging from climatology to Planet Earth’s location in Sagittarius where Crux branches off from Carina, to certain Stoic meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and so on.
Read Jacques Barzun, “Dawn to Decadence” (c. 1996). Therein you will find Western Civilization from 1450 – 1950… Barzun tends to scant mathematical logic (Godel), most economists; genomic biochemistry, quantum physics; AI, computer sciences, robotics– in a word, conceptual underpinnings of the modern age from Maxwell on. So what– he composed this magisterial treatise as Emeritus Professor at age ninety-four, whereas today’s closeted and formulaic academics wouldn’t know Byzantium from Baltimore. Meantime, we are completing a 180,000-word literary fable regarding Wise Learning and Right Choice, which agent says “has merit– powerfully original”. Maybe Rubius Hagrid will obtain a remaindered copy.
This blogger-vs.-credentialed doofus controversy is much overblown. If it’s worth reading –interesting and informative, suggestive of context and perspective– we’ll give it a scan. But TV since the mid-1960s, print media (papers and periodicals) from the early 1980s, have actively hindered any disinterested observer’s efforts to obtain broad-based, rational coverage of any topic. Hyper-partisanship, supercilious scare-mongering, extraordinary ignorance and ill-will regarding economics, non-sectarian religion, historic socio-cultural norms, have reduced “reporters” to guttersnipes sieving backed-up sewers of their own devising.
Just this week, a recent Dartmouth graduate called Ragos (yes?) applied his sophisticated expertise to a kindergarten-level rant about how anyone outside corporate cubicles can hardly spell “floccipaucinihilipilification” (coined by Edward de Vere, The Bard, commonly designated “Spear Shaker” from Oxford’s association with chaste Athena, Goddess of Wisdom portrayed by Phidias in the Parthenon). Ragos’ somewhat truncated vocabulary ought to include ye olde Floccipauci, for his proclivities exemplify it: “Habitual denigation”, a dolt’s tendency to dismiss anything beyond his impoverished comprehension, i.e. everything that challenges his self-serving, preconceived worldview.
We’ll take honest comment, careful observation, informed theses by bloggers over mass-media’s destructive propaganda anytime. Eight years old or eighty, anything you say will likely prove superior to such Buggywhip Award contenders as Ragos the Reminiscent– “so young and yet so vile” (Cato).
Oldephartteintraining’s first commenter was blogger threescoreandtenormore ( who was on hiatus in Europe last time I checked : but had wonderful tales online when posting ). Just so you don’t think old farts don’t blog ; just criticize.
While I agree with many of the points made by John Blake above, I feel that, in order to prevent readers being misinformed, it ought to be pointed out that the correct spelling is “floccinaucinihilipilification”.
Serious question, not criticism: is it “jack-in-the-boxes” or “jacks-in-the-box”?
This reminds me of something I’ve thought a lot in the past few years. That the idea of teaching someone how to communicate involves a kind of hubris that contradicts the premise of reporting. Our J-schools and elite centers of education inculcate pride, a sense of being better, smarter, and more wise than those you claim to be serving.
We still manage to produce some terrific writers, but I suspect they are born, not made. The best ones have a gift and a drive to understand what’s going on and pass it on to others.
I think Cathy Seipp is a wonderful writer because of her humility and honesty and her gift of spotting the real issues and pointing them out cogently and with spareness and clarity.
I don’t really care for people like those who keep writing disdainfully about bloggers, as though they are all the same. I suspect that they resort to invective to cover their own insecurity. They secretly think that blogs are a threat to their livelihood. The real threat to them is their own arrogance, because readers aren’t all as dumb as they think.
Thanks, John Blake for reminding us of the longer view –and for the gentle rebuke to Ragos, whose rant (on his own op-ed page: talk about home-court advantage) struck me as under-meditated. For me the tension between “old media” and blogs is measured using parameters such as time, space and linkage.
(1) Time here means intrinsic cycle-time: how fast can the media producer receive new info, analyze it and send out a response over the channel, as part of the collective “discourse.” With a print mag, it’s weeks and weeks; with a newspaper, it’s days; with TV or radio, it’s not much less in practice than a newspaper but call it a few hours (to round up resource, get approval, find time slot in the product stream, deliver update). With blogs and the like, it’s minutes. The difference between a few weeks and a few days (slow print media and fast ones) is say 10x. The difference between a few days and a few hours (fast print media and broadcast media) is again about 10x. But the difference between a few hours and a few minutes (fastest broadcast media and average blogger) is not 10x. It’s more like 100x and that assumes the non-blog media is on red-alert flank-speed unsustainably quick turnaround cycle to meet a crisis. While for the blogger, sitting around in pajamas, it’s just another round of discussion and comment with however many other smart and interested people are paying heed. That instantaneity can lead to infantile outbursts and logorrhea. And that speed of propagation among networks of bloggers as an issue heats up, can cause crazy spikes and bad gossip. But when done right it allows bloggers to spot and explore and pressure-test and add new dimensions to a story long before the other (corporatized) media can even get started. When the tsunami hit Thailand 2 years ago, bloggers were putting up videostreams of the beaches, running stories, and posting contacts for donations, before Dan Rather had had time to tell his team to start thinking about plane tickets for Bangkok. .
(2) Space here means intellectual cross-section: who, besides himself or herself, does the writer include in the argument? How broad a view, whose analysis or what prior facts, does the writer consider –or is the writer just indulging in partisan or solipsistic gestures? Ironic that Blake, using a medium that lends itself to narcissism, should sweep up so many interesting and varied facts and allusions, directing our minds “outward” into that intellectual space –while Ragos, using the medium that allows more judicious reflection and orderly development of ideas, should suffer in comparison to Blake.
(3) Finally, linkage. Print-on-paper is “flat” –it can give footnotes but not live links to sources. TV and radio, ditto; only more so –if it’s hard to remember a phone number that’s shown or spoken in those media, far worse when it’s a web address, then needing transcription into a computer and logging-on to web, etc. And because this linking is enabled by blogs (and with intuitive ease), blogs without links become conspicuous, and maybe a little devalued –people expect (or should expect: the cultural norms here are evolving pretty fast) to be able to check the underlying record and thus test how much bias or BS has afflicted the blogger. The blog message is no longer just the blogger’s statement, it’s statement-plus-support as enabled by the links to sources. The constant check of story to source (like a feedback loop in a signal circuit) not only forces people to blog more honestly, it creates an environment where everybody is part of the loop and can help improve the product by commenting. Like a Wiki, where if a reader sees error, he can (and should) seek to correct it. Peer review process is implicit and constant: everybody stands in the role of witness. And when people are peers, they generally behave better than those who pound keyboards in a newsroom, get buy-in from a cadre of overseers who drink the same Kool-aid, and then send it to the press room –with feedback (if any) arriving days later and being given a public airing if and only if the keyboard-pounders and the editorial cadres think it would be in their interest. The blogs’ atmosphere of constructive criticism forces good bloggers to do their homework and share their sources through inclusion of live links and through posting of smart, cogent, often witty comments..That atmosphere is for me a big part of the value that the new medium offers, and which the old media do not, both because of bad habits acquired during their preeminence, and to a degree because of their na(ure. The former they may change, the latter they cannot.
First I am an old-fart myself.
But I do have to point out a few terminology problems.
pods – how cute, but I’ve worked in one for years, and in the general vernacular they are called cubicles. And a whole bunch of cubiles are called a ‘farm’.
podmates and ‘popping up’ – How uninformed Mr. Baker is, for there is an actual term for this too — ‘Prairie Dogging’. The act of more than one cubicle occuptant looking up over the cube farm.
At this point I would have to rate Mr. Baker either a D or possibly an F in the fundamentals of covering a story. Those two terms would be considered ‘background’. The guy lacks any since of the here and now. Hope his 401(k) is well stocked.
Homer,
Jacks-in-the-box. My writing coach told me.
David Crisp
I’m no writing coach but recognize “s” as an indicator of plurality. I’d like to hear the rationale for indicating multiple jacks in one box instead of multiple boxes with a jack. I warn you it’ll be a very hard sell.