Regardless of attitudes towards the editorial policies of the daily press, the fact remains that professional news organizations staffed by professional journalists are our best, most reliable, source of major news stories. For all their alleged faults they are the only game in town.

(And what about network news programs? For the most part they seem to deliver information derived elsewhere. The exception of course are video photo-op ‘late-breaking’ stories of car crashes and fires. But the nature of the medium seems to preclude thoughtful, long-form features and backgrounders that we get in the print press.)

Bloggers would be hard pressed for the news they comment on if it weren’t for the stories developed by their professional brethren. But at the same time bloggers have held the professionals’ feet to the fire for not picking up on important, but ignored, stories.

As aggregators bloggers need stories to ‘aggregate.’ Nothing wrong with that. That function is important for bringing to the blogger’s special audience stories that might have otherwise been missed.

As news gatherers and investigators reporters have decided advantages over bloggers. In what follows I understand that there are always exceptions that prove the rule.

One of the greatest is that they are employed. Bloggers often have other jobs or full time obligations. If they don’t feel like writing, or haven’t the time, or are writing incompetently, there is no editor or publisher threatening unemployment. You can’t lay off someone who doesn’t work for you.

Reporters (providing there’s a benevolent nod from some assignment editor) have time to pursue an investigation or write a long-form feature. If they are short of ideas someone will surely ‘suggest’ that they get busy.

I believe that in journalism schools novice reporters are taught how to use all the public sources of information, and what they are…city agencies, public records like property reports, police reports, corporate records and so forth. There are lots of them. My guess is that bloggers are far from knowing them all.

Perhaps a reporter’s biggest advantage is what I think of as an “Implied Authority to Ask Questions.”  The reporter can call someone, identify himself or herself as from The Daily Blatt and at least expect to be listened to. (No answers to questions guaranteed, of course.)

If he tells the interviewed source that the conversation is “off the record” or “on background” that source has at least a reasonable expectation of the conditions being honored. But call up a possible source and say, “Hello, I’m Joe Bloggs could you comment on….” click.

For the coverage of local events bloggers may have some advantages over reporters. For the most part they write about material they already know and are interested in. They probably have sources they trust and who trust them; general assignment reporters, coming new to a topic, may may not.

Carolyn’s Community, and One Can a Week do an excellent job, as do our sports guys, Zoom Zoom Tucson, Comic Matters, Tucson Tails, and Views From Baja Arizona… to name only a few. (In my judgement Hugh Holub has provided the best coverage of the border in Southern Arizona.)

To round out the offerings we have enough cranky columnists and their annoyed commentators to satisfy just about any reader.

On a final note, we bloggers are expected to credit the material from which we quote. At least “A NY Times report says” and so on. The expectation doesn’t always go both ways. Sometimes we’re granted no more than “A local blog reports.” Oh? And which blog is that, and what news source is it published in? Attribution should be a two way street.

I’m pretty sure what they’re going to find; some comments are civil and the occasional comment is raunchy and offensive. Comments that violate the Star’s rules of acceptable standards are frequently removed.

It does seem to me that the denizens of the Star comment threads are a bit more excitable than what we see here at Citizen.com, but I may be prejudiced. At any rate, it’s probably best if we don’t expect too much cooly reasoned debate in a venue one function of which is to allow for blowing off steam.

I’ll be interested to see how the researchers measure civility. Will there be units of civility (Raunchies), applied according to some standard of measurement? Will we be able to say of some post, “That was uncivil to the four ‘Raunchie’ level?”

I think most people recognize when discourse becomes uncivil, and in the real world restrain themselves— from fear of public disapproval of behavior that is ill bred or boorish.

In the virtual world of comment threads there would probably be a major improvement in tone if every comment required the use of one’s real name. This could be assured by site management, which already knows the names of our commentators.

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About The Data Port

“You want something higher, a prickly Everyman speaking half-truths to power, go scare up Joe the Plumber. All I know is this: I am a schlub walking a high wire between paydays in steel-toed shoes. And my name is legion.”

His wonderful essay on what the working life is, and its values, was recently published in Esquire.

“I grew up in a blue-collar Cleveland neighborhood, a little bit of Old Europe transplanted onto a bend of the Cuyahoga River. The men — Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Ukies, Hungarians — were scrappers and needed to be. Their wives stayed home, had gardens and babies, and could see the future in the bottoms of teacups.

I never needed a fortune-teller to see mine. It came shuffling past our porch every evening at 5:25, toting a lunch pail. At eighteen you were swallowed by the python and made your way through the beast like a lump. At the other end was a mill pension, casino trips on a bus charter twice a year, and church bingo every Wednesday.

You don’t always have work. After losing a job, five months went by before the loading dock job came up.

Once a month I update my résumé. Why, I don’t know exactly. When I was looking, five months spent on orange plastic interview chairs, with my livelihood hanging on reliable transportation and a willingness to pee in a stranger’s cup, that was the mantra. “Make sure you keep your résumé updated,” some hiring clerk would tell me.

So I walk the hall of mirrors. There I am at the beginning — my hair is black and my back is straight, and I’m sliding into my first Ford, heading off to work. “Honky Tonk Women” is on the radio. Then I’m gone, pushing, pulling my way down a tunnel. A page later you look up and that gray-haired daddy o’ mine is … you. That’s the working life.

No illusions: The only way I will ever see Paris is on the Travel Channel. I will never taste cassoulet unless they put it on the menu at Sheetz. I’m okay with that. One day you stare into the bathroom mirror and Willie Nelson is staring back at you. I’m okay with that, too.

 

You tote a lot more to work in a lunch pail than Ring Dings. You pack alimony and autism diagnoses and car notes and the rest of the workingman’s grind. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Also braces, a better school, and a down payment on that spring field trip. And you chew whatever has been dumped on your plate in silence.

You don’t go into therapy. You go to work.

Read More: http://www.esquire.com/features/essay/john-hyduk-0511

Sadly, in the age of bullet points, run-on sentences, and  tweets, this richness and complexity is either lost on, or completely baffles, the average  writer.

Often it is with pairs of words that the careless writer has problems. Is it “shall” or “will”? Never mind, I’ll cover my indecision with an apostrophe.

There seems to be an epidemic merging of “valid” with “true” so that we feel free to use one for the other with little understanding of their difference. Validity is a characteristic of arguments; truth is a characteristic of propositions. Consider the following argument:

All celestial bodies are made of cream cheese,

The moon is a celestial  body

Therefore the moon is made of cream cheese.

This is a formally valid argument, yet it is false that the moon is made of cream cheese because the major premise is false.

Well, this distinction probably makes no fine difference in the twitter-verse since we all, like, understand one another anyway. By the way, the subjunctive mood is essentially dead…at least amongst the ill-educated…so I wouldn’t worry about that either, if I was you.

Many of the technical terms of political discourse that appear in comment threads are used for little more than an acquired emotional tone. Marxist! Communist! Socialist! Fascist! are epithets thrown at opponents to indicate our disapproval of them. As readers we often wonder whether the commenter understands what they mean, or whether he understands his opponent’s position.

Now, consider “anarchy” and “Anarchism.”

Anarchy (with a small “a”) is the confusion and lack of order that follows on the failure or breakdown of law and government; or it’s the confusion or lack of order of any kind.

Anarchism, on the other hand, is a philosophy of social organization. There is a confusing wealth of “anarchisms,” however the the core belief of all is that government is a form of tyranny that must be destroyed.

But anarchists are not fools; they recognize that that modern society is complex and that mechanisms for the exchange of goods and services must be established. For instance the Anarcho-Syndicalists, who flourished during the Spanish Civil War, conceived of a society organized from the bottom up through an integrated system of trade unions and the collective ownership and management of the means of production.

To learn a bit more about this form of anarchism take a look at  this:

What gets written here, according to Gannett, are blogs. As bloggers we are independent entities, for whom our publisher accepts no responsibility.

This is not necessarily a good thing.

No assignment editor is pointing us in the direction of a reportorial task and no copy editor is vetting the copy for style or fact. This accounts for the occasionally rackety and unrestrained nature of a good deal of what goes on here.

A case in point is a recent posting over at “The View from Baja Arizona.” I’m a big booster of Hugh Holub’s coverage of the border. That said, this piece could have used the helpful hand of a fair-minded editor.

Holub draws a stark picture of cartel violence and of the apparent inability of the Mexican government to control it. He will eventually ask the sorts of “what is to be done” questions that could stimulate thoughtful debate: Should we make cross-border military incursions? Should we legalize drugs to kill the profit motive?

Fair enough; but first he introduces the question of Aztec human sacrifice and wonders if there may not be something in Mexican cultural history that explains cartel savagery. The implication seems to be that Mexicans are genetically predisposed to violence.

And the ‘chit’ hits the fan. An editor might well have pencilled out Aztec sacrifice on the grounds that it is really a distraction from his central concern, or that the attribution of a genetic disposition to violence is factually dubious.  I can hear the editor saying, “It’s the blue pencil or the spike, take your choice.”

Cross-posted to: http://thedataport.blogspot.com

Read Holub’s column here.

The New York Times reported today that Scribner, a Simon and Shuster company, will publish Mark and Gabrielle’s memoir.

From the Times article:

“The book will be an account of their courtship, Ms. Giffords’s political career and the attack in Tucson in January that left Ms. Giffords gravely wounded with a gunshot wound to the head, according to a statement from Scribner. “We are deeply honored to publish Mark Kelly’s and Gabby Giffords’ memoir, which will fully unfold the remarkable story of two exceptionally brave public servants,” said Susan Moldow, the publisher of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.”

Mark and Gabby will be assisted in the writing by Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Cross-posted to: http://Thedataport.blogspot.com

The major disadvantage of working at home is that you are never out of the office. Twenty-four hours a day you could be working. You can’t say, “By golly, if I were at the office I’d re-write that character sketch,” because you are at the office, it’s just down the hall from you. Hence, your worry pendulum swings relentlessly back and forth between work, guilt at not working, and anxiety about unfinished assignments. This is not relaxing. Rats.

That’s the reason many writers are driven to find an office someplace else: anything to get out of the house. That’s what I’ve done, and it seems to me lots of foothills people have done the same thing. Unfortunately they have all chosen my office space, but I try to treat this as just another opportunity to get to know my neighbors.

From my office window I  watch  SUVs  and luxury cars as ponderous as elephants, gingerly swap parking places;  angling in and out of the lot. My motorcycle is there, because I’m working today. Writing this, as a matter of fact. It’s quite likely that the guy with the white K100 BMW will swoop down from Tierra Serenas, leave his helmet on the bike, and pop in to meet a friend. A Harley rider is an occasional visitor, too. A real rider and not just a weekend warrior, judging from the mileage on his odometer.

(Bike people tend to sneak a peek at the other guy’s odometer the way dogs sniff rumps.)

Friends and intimates criticize me for my office  choice. I am deaf to the criticism, which most often (and annoyingly) takes the form that I spend too much for a cup of coffee. But that’s absurd. I’m not buying coffee at all, I’m renting office space.

Starbucks rents me the space. I get a table, a chair, and an executive washroom. If I beat the guy  writing the novel to the corner table by the electric outlet, I get power for my laptop. Best of all the management throws in a cup of whatever is in the big urn behind the counter to say thanks for the business. Two bucks, change in the tip box. A deal.

We’re a varied group in my office complex. I see the two backgammon players are here today. The game is usually preceded by a discussion of what I assume are business documents, but now the papers have been stuffed into their purses, which are on the ground beside them, a cigarette is going and the game is on.

The novel writer is not here, but the distinguished older gentleman is. That’s the way I think of him, The Distinguished Older Gentleman. Always elegantly, if informally, dressed, razor-sharp crease in his slacks, polished shoes, shirt collar open but under a blue blazer with four gold buttons on each sleeve. Bent over papers, making a careful note or two with a pen and clearly thoughtful, he makes a fellow proud to be seen working here.

We do try to be reasonably discreet in our commercial activities so as not to disturb  the folks in the library… the man reading the biography of Churchill, the woman deep in a book of anatomical drawings, or the teacher tutoring a student for her SATs.

One day a young guy my grandpa would have called ‘a traveling man’ set up a complete office. He spread out over a table for four with cell phone, laptop, sample book, PDA, and calling list. Starbucks must have been very glad to see him because they gave him a super sized coffee-flavored beverage, a drink with a name six words long that ended in ‘latte’

Depending on the time of day we’ll see people who think this is just a place to buy coffee and visit, and that’s nice, too. It keeps you in touch with the community, rather like strolling around a busy village square: Three women planning  a gathering…geezers reading the newspapers… young people in hip huggers and  flip-flops…pretty much a fair sampling of who we are up here.

Now all I need is a time clock and a place to display my business cards. Need to write a proposal? The writer is in, but his coffee is cold.