Desperately Seeking the News
Dear Frank, I hope this letter finds you well. How have you been? We haven’t talked in years now. Amazing how time flies. Listen, this is out of the blue, but I think we might have been a little mean to you when we were younger. I apologize.
Remember that time we characterized you as a bit of a buffoon—an absentee editor who turned the once-proud Tennessean into just another Gannett product? Well, looking back, that was a little much. Oh, we blamed you for neglecting investigative reporting and for diluting your political coverage. Gosh, we even blamed you for Brad Schmitt. We mocked you for that awkward testimonial you gave to Al Gore while he was running for president. We even made fun of your silly wine column, like when you tried to weigh in on the Survivor craze by suggesting that “a white Zinfandel” would go best with insects.
But hey, we’re not trying to rehash the bad times. I guess when we prepare to offer our contrition, we’re reminded of a few of your less-than-admirable qualities. But that’s our issue, not yours. And we weren’t blameless, Frank. No, we weren’t blameless at all. We poked at you incessantly even though we knew that you were trying to strike a balance. You learned about how to edit a good newspaper from John Seigenthaler, but you also had to listen to Gannett and the company’s ever-changing formulas about how to package news. And deep down we knew that. We just would never admit it. At least not to ourselves. Oh Frank, what happened to us? Maybe in some sort of parallel universe out there, the two of us are sitting in a Gannett break room collaborating with a focus group about how to improve our newspaper’s political coverage. There we are, dressed in pleated khakis and matching sweater vests, trading folksy jokes about corporate. Can’t you just see us doing that?
Frank, maybe this is not the right thing to say, but we miss you. Really, we do. Not in a snarky, sarcastic way, as in we miss subjecting you to public ridicule. No, we miss your judgment. Your stewardship. God damn it, Frank, we even miss your journalism.
I know, this all sounds so strange coming from us. We can only imagine you now, sipping on a Yellow Tail and stroking the stubble on your chin as you read this, a wispy grin creeping across your craggy visage. Oh, how we wish we could read a Local News section from your tenure, back before it was only five pages.
Frank, the guy who is editing The Tennessean now—well, he’s just not you. I don’t mean to pry, but do you ever read your old paper? Last week, when the state Republican Party purposefully referred to “Barack Hussein Obama” to draw attention to his Muslim-sounding middle name, news outlets all over the world reported about our state’s gutter politics. And the Nashville City Paper kept the Hussein story on its front page for days. But Frank, your old paper buried this national story on page 6B—the back of the local news section in a column called “The Online Buzz.” It didn’t even take the trouble to report the story, instead just regurgitating what bloggers were writing about it. How the new guy loves those bloggers; it makes him feel all cutting edge. But you never cared about such things.
Frank, we know you. Yeah, you had your faults. Who doesn’t? But you would have placed the “Hussein” story on page one. You knew a good story when you saw it. Maybe you would have fallen in love with the bloggers too, especially if Gannett demanded it. But would you have ever wasted your time writing about them like the guy running The Tennessean now? Of course not, because deep down you were never one of those Gannett guys. You might have acted like them and sometimes talked in corporate speak. But that was never who you were. You disguised it very well, but you were better than them. You know, Frank, our relationship wasn’t always filled with respect and happiness. But you need to know this: We always knew your heart was in journalism. You were a damn good investigative reporter in your prime, and even if you lost your way when you moved to the top of the masthead, you knew how to run a newspaper with minimum competency.
There we go again, Frank, with our passive-aggressive bullshit. We just can’t seem to let go of the past. But we don’t like the crazy, mixed-up world we’re living in now. Sometimes we even forget to read your old paper. Frank, the day The Tennessean buried the “Hussein” story on 6B, they put a 56-year-old sled dog racer on the front page. Can you believe that?Well, it’s getting late. By the way, we miss your intoxicating wine columns. All we get from the new guy are the grapes of wrath.
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