In officiating, it's always good when your game fee check has a comma in it. I suppose the same can be said for writing and hits, and I'm not talking about the kind of hits Ty Cobb or Pete Rose counted.
I was rather ubiquitous yesterday, as my Citizen Journalism post got a lot of run among local and national journalists, and that tells me two things. Journalists are still passionate about their craft or reading and writing. Second, there's a lot of e-banter being circulated about my post -- journalists have figured out how to use today's e-social tools seamlessly -- why can management do the same?
A few hearty souls from The Ann Arbor News took issue with my review of their publication and I do respect their spirit for sticking up for their paper. Jim Carty's cleverly-titled blog, Paper Tiger No More, linked me and offer a sweet-n-sour review of my writing. Thanks for the link, Jim. No hard feelings.
I was also linked at Fade To Black, a media watchdog site. Other links include Inside Out, a writer from Flint, Michigan who writes about Michigan media happenings, and the same writer's Wired Journalists site.
It's sad this is happening but it's also an absolute truth of the information age we're all living in. Hell, Carty quoted Jason Whitlock's Facebook page and a one-line quip about The Ann Arbor News's recent announcement it will shutter as a point of merit for discrediting me. I was both amused at the reference and saddened by the laziness it represents, because there was no context to the quote. Whitlock's quote really could have meant anything.
For the record, I don't hate The Ann Arbor News and I do think it's terrible they're closing. I do hate what they did to the Ypsilanti Press and how they tried to fool the good people of Ypsi into thinking they actually cared about Ypsi, the schools, city government and Eastern Michigan University with their ill-fated Ypsi Press edition of The Ann Arbor News. Many staffers at the current 'News' aren't aware in November 1994, The Ann Arbor Observer printed a freelancer's highly-detailed look at the 'culture of fear' at The Ann Arbor News. The piece was titled "The News Loses A Star" and detailed Jason Whitlock's hastily-summoned departure, the ugly fallout from scraping unsavory review of the city's annual art fair in favor of wire copy, the ways the paper painted certain African-American writers through the paper's self-promotion and the shameless reporting of a nationally-known infant custody battle, the subject being baby Jessica DeBoer, now known as Anna Schmidt.
Any real newshound can find the article if they want -- it's at the Ann Arbor district library and can be viewed and copied free of charge. I've kept a copy since the day I read it almost 15 years ago. The freelancer who wrote the piece? Well, I won't name him specifically but his initials are John Bacon.
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