"i bet if we locked a bunch of monkeys in a room, chained to typewriters, we could come up with better crap than this..."
** So I've decided to include, on the blog, some semi-regular thoughts about local media outlets, because in this age of oh-no-newspapers-are-about-to-die, and nick-denton-is-selling-off-all-his-good-blogs, and why-are-americans-so-stupid-and-ignorant-of-current events, Baltimore actually has a pretty vibrant media scene, and it's one that's worth observing.
Is it just me, or is the Examiner's coverage getting better? First of all, they've re-done their website, although it takes an extra click to the "today's paper" page to actually see their local coverage, rather than sifting through dozens of crap links to stories from MSN and (bewilderingly) papers that they compete with. But I was impressed today with the following stories, at least for a tab that specializes in making up gruesome serial murders:
* The local NAACP takes on an attack of the fiendish, racist BLOB!
* Aaron Cahall, my development coverage counterpart at the E, clocks in rather late on TrendWatch 2008, but at least it's real news.
* And this article about the Columbia-India axis of entrepreneurship is great.
The print edition third issue of the Sun's new tabloid b continues the weirdness with its extensive, abrasive coverage of death, murder, rape, and prostitution, mostly in the form of syndicated Sun news briefs that lack the brilliance that can come with some of the Sun's better reporting, like this exciting play-by-play of a cop shooting in West Baltimore that happened yesterday. Damn, that article really put me in the moment.
But the most interesting thing about b is its main "columnist," Lori Barrett, who is apparently a "blogger," not a reporter, but I guess her work appears in print every day too? So like, I'm reading a printed column, on a piece of low-grade recycled paper, in a printed tabloid product, but just because it's called a "blog," it's supposed to be cooler to me? Because I'm of the internet generation and I don't have time for real columns -- just columns that are called blogs? Is that the idea?
Anyway, she got a lot of crap the other day for calling the Sun's crime reporting inadequate, with nasty comments from an anonymous forum-reader called "Sun crime reporter," and the ever-hilarious taotechuck, from Baltimore Crime, all of whom quite elegantly pointed out what I was getting at in a previous post about b -- that the Tribune company has so little respect for its employees that it fires the experienced, well-paid ones, and replaces them with cut-rate (literally) writers with little to no expertise, who actually rag on the reporters who are left over. It's nuts, I tell ya.
The other weird thing about b is the "heard" page (b doesn't do capital letters), which is usually somewhere around page 14, and includes "what you're writing"-style reader columns, and my personal fav, the "RANTS: READERS SOUND OFF" info-graphic, in which readers send 140 characters or less text messages about what they don't like about life, the city, people, their moms, whatever. Here's an example from today's paper:
"People who feel like they are entitled to things and get bossy and mean about them."
The thing that I'm confused about is, what is the question that prompts these sorts of responses? Is it like, "What kind of people bother you?" or "What do you think there should be a law against?" Because what kind of person is just feeling so damn mad at bossy, entitled people, that they feel compelled to text b about it? It kind of feels like they make up these "rants," the same way they make up the letters to the editor at Blender (and probably other music) magazines. Those magazines have 2.5 month lead times, and they go to print more than a month before they come out. Ever wonder how they got readers to read the previous month's issue and respond to its articles in time for the next issue? That's one of the valuable media lessons I learned while interning there. Hell, I even wrote some of those letters. It was fun.
That's all for now. I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Laurel, in between reporting assignments at Fort Meade and South Baltimore. PEEEEEEEEEEACE.
No comments:
Post a Comment