Sunday, August 9, 2009
Media / Phillips Say My Name, Say My Name
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 11:58 AM
And the truth is, I don't think it's my job.
We were having this argument last week about my post on Ian Shapira. Caleb Hannan thought I was being unfair to Shapira by typifying his whole piece as "Boo hoo, Gawker sent me an audience."
In fact, he said to me that when he clicked through and found that wasn't the case, he felt like it hurt my credibility. And I was a little stunned by this, because, after all, I am a blogger. You're supposed to read what I write and read what I'm writing about and decide for yourself if I'm full of shit. And if I'm full of shit, fine, let's argue about it and see what comes of it.
Bloggers and journalists are doing two different, but overlapping things. I see my role as being an informed observer who hears people talking at the bar or at the grocery store or in the parking lot or wherever and brings that weirdly hidden public knowledge into plain view. When I bother to call people or email folks in order to find out more, I only do it because I occassionally have to sit across from folks who do call and email and who will embarrass me half to death if I don't.
"Did you even bother to ask?" is a pretty big motivator.
But I do that out of pride, not because a loud-mouth blogger should.
Whew, this is a long introduction to my critique of Mark Silverman's publicly embarrassing himself today, but I want to be upfront on my biases.
Silverman is upset because it came out this week that the public relations firm the city had hired to inform people about the new convention center charged the city for helping Silverman's columnist, Gail Kerr, research her columns about the convention center. He thinks The Tennessean's honor has been impugned.
There are a number of problems with his position, but I'd like to take on the most egregious.
1. He doesn't name names. Silverman says
Those reports and subsequent chatter on some blogs suggested that the firm coaxed favorable coverage about the civic center from The Tennessean; some bloggers and story chat participants even suggested that a Tennessean staffer was paid to write positive reports.
Okay, who? Who are these bloggers who are suggesing that Tennessean staffers were paid to write positive reports? Where are the quotes from the blog posts that have maligned your paper? Who exactly are these nefarious assholes?
There are only two reasons to not name names. One is kind of understandable. You hate having to be a part of the online community and you don't want to have to understand it or give any more credibility to it than you have to. So you just conflate bloggers with commenters and posters on chats and call it all the same to you.
The other is that there are no such bloggers, that youre just pitching a fit because you're embarrassed and you want someone to blame and journalists love to blame bloggers, because you fear bloggers are putting you out of business.
Clearly Silverman is not making things up, so I guess we have to suppose that he can't actually bring himself to treat the teeming voices of folks who read him with respect, because they are on the internet.
2. So, Gail Kerr, in working on a story, discovers that she, an employee of the media outlet with an audience that "dwarfs that of a single television station's newscast and the most-read blogs in town," that she can't even get a reply from a government official and she doesn't find that newsworthy?
A newspaper writer can't get a city official to respond to her calls and so she has to go to a private entity in order to get information on a public project and that's not newsworthy? Not even worth mentioning? A private business had effectively wedged itself between the 4th estate and the government it's supposed to monitor and that's just how it goes?
I'm not suggesting that The Tennessean is in the pocket of developers. But I am saying that, when you find it so unremarkable that you can't speak directly to a government official, but get funneled to a private company that has no accountability to the public that you don't even bother to mention it, you are doing a disservice to your readers who have no idea that this is how things work.
It's not that you're in the pocket of developers or the government. It's that you think you're in their league, that how things work is something understood among peers, not something that has to be trotted out to the masses.
And by setting yourself up against the bloggers you won't even bother to name, you've done nothing to reassure most folks that this isn't true.
Comments (12)
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Silverman's straw man arguments are laughable. No one really said that the Tennessean's coverage can be bought, just that it can be manipulated.
He blames Channel 5 and others for mentioning how much the Gail Kerr column cost the city. He himself says MPF approached her to make a pitch on behalf of the convention center -- she didn't go to them. They wanted a positive opinion piece and got it, then they charged the city a lot of money for it. He doesn't mention what, if anything, she might have done to get the other side.
He also doesn't mention that his boss, Ellen Leifeld, now chairs the CVB, which is pushing for the convention center. The publisher has no say in her paper's coverage?
And, if his reporters were all over the MDHA contracts, how did they miss this one?
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If you don't and can't do what the Scene's reporters do, why in the hell are you writing pieces that appear under the Scene's logo on their site? It's a convenient excuse to say that a blog is different from journalism, especially since a lot of the items here also wind up in the print edition of the Scene, as reportage.
Um, sure, it's a good point, only if you're under the impression tht I write all the posts here, which then end up in the print edition. Which is demonstrably not the case, so...
I'm not allowed to be just a blogger because journalists blog, too?
I'm not buying it.
As mad as my love is for your bloggery, you do realize the irony of this post, don't you?
You wanted the newspaper to name the bloggers? Heck yeah! A shout-out in the paper is not only an ego boost, but it drives traffic to sites like your own Tiny Cat Pants.
But that's the EXACT thing you lambasted the Washington Post reporter for, when he pointed out that Gawker was stealing his thunder. Say my name runs both ways.
HaHA! The tiny cat pants are on the other foot now! Wait, no, that doesn't sound right...
Wait. What?
No, that's really not the exact think I lambasted Shapira for. I lambasted Shapira for being a big baby about GETTING traffic from bloggers. I'm now lambasting Silverman for being a big baby about GIVING traffic to bloggers.
I believe those are opposite.
But, I will admit, I have now been convinced that Gawker was unfair to Shapira and I concede your point that Shapira was right to want to be named more prominently by Gawker.
See, America? A girl can change her position after persuasive discussion.
Proof that blogging works.
Aunt B.,
If you keep demonstrating this sort of fairness and honesty, you will give Pith a good name.
Oh, god, that's just what I need--to be the girl blamed for ruining Pith.
Ha ha ha.
Oh, Mark, you make me blush a little bit.
Aunt B.,
One might think that being:
"The pen that launched a thousand posts
and burnt the bottomless standards of Pithium"
would be a valued tribute.
Anyway, I hope you are feeling better.
Aunt B / Betsy:
I did not realize that apparently you are the same person. That you obviously don't write all of the pieces on this site strikes me as rather beside the point. Maybe an analogy will make my point better. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I'm buying a new Nissan truck (to keep the analogy semi-local). Nissan obviously relies on a number of suppliers for components that go into their vehicles. But in the finished product all of those assembled components fall under the Nissan brand banner. Nissan is accountable for their quality and reliability.
So if you're a blogger who happens to be writing for the Scene, and whose work is displayed under their logo, I would expect it to be held to the same journalistic standards that I would hold the blog posts of their staff writers.
Besides all that, and though I realize that the blog-world doesn't seem to think this applies to them, I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that, even as a "blogger," you have a responsibility to the public that goes beyond a la-de-da of "I just put my content out there and let readers judge whether or not it's bullshit." I mean, couldn't those in the birther movement, or who claim that the healthcare bill in Congress is a plot to kill old people, make the same claim as you're making? They're just putting ideas out there to compete in the marketplace and figure the market will eventually make everything right (notwithstanding the frightening percentage of our fellow Southerners who have doubts that Obama was born in America). Surely you have an obligation to a higher standard than this. You shouldn't be able to hide behind the excuse that "Hey, it's just a blog."
