I blog therefore I am (on being a newspaper warrior)
It's been many moons since the Bully Pulpit published what was at one time a weekly rant. Many are the reasons for this — a new job (bed weditor, if you haven't heard), a new baby, and a realization that an opinion column can greatly complicate one's ability to cover a beat, etc.
But now, under cover of the World Wide Web, I'm back. As an editor, it's OK for me to have an opinion, and it's OK for me to make fun of public officials, and it's OK to think I'm better that everyone else.
I'm OK, you're OK, so let's blog.
My first topic — the newspaper war. A few of us a the old T-S have weathered virtually all of the Arkley storm. John Driscoll, Chris Durant and myself were here when the A-Team first launched their assault on the large if unsightly ramparts of the Times-Standard building. Others, like Kim Wear, arrived soon after, and have made themselves invaluable in the fight.
Rumor has it that the war was started because the T-S didn't endorse Cherie Arkley for mayor. While that may have been a factor, I had heard long before the endorsement was announced that there was a well-to-do man around who was out to start his own newspaper and put the T-S out of business.
Some five years later, that newspaper started, run a well-funded assault that at this point seems to have failed utterly. We are stronger for it. I'll make a bold claim here — we are the best newsroom this newspaper has had in 20 years, due to the competition, and the bloodthirst that goes along with it. Don't get me wrong — we have our detractors, and we have our mistakes. But we work hard, pursue the truth, pursue innovation, and we get along in the process. No, maybe we don't write the long-winded and sometimes pretty sentences of the local alternative weekly, and we don't have color photographs on every page; but we do have truth-seekers on our staff, and we ask the right questions, and we keep asking them. Besides all of that, we have personality, and we have fun.
FYI, folks — there's not much more you can ask for in a small local paper.
Now while it can be said that we've effectively won the war, with that Other Paper being ratcheted down to five days a week, the truth is we like the feeling of competition. So the urge to compete and win engenders in us a generosity of spirit that tells us they're not dead. They may be breathing heavy, they may be limping along under the full weight of the sub-prime mortgage market, and they may be listing even farther to the right in a community located smack dab in the middle of what is effectively the Left Coast, but in our eyes they're still the over-funded and overly self-righteous rag that threatens to take away all of our jobs. Such thinking keeps our minds in the game.
Comments
Welcome back to the pulpit, James.
Posted by: Heraldo | December 14, 2007 05:07 PM
I look forward to your dialog on the the state of news here. Since Buhne went belly up we have not had much. Heraldo rips the A-Team and they deserve it, but my biggest complaint is the TS often whitewashes hard news, and we have to depend on Hank over at the NCJ. The Baywood Virus (aks Norvirus) is a case in point where everyone pussyfooted around a situation that sickened about 500 people, not the 166 the paper implied.
So let have more hard news, and more local news.
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