Coaches wife confronts columnist in press box

She's guilty of dragging her family through a tremendous amount of pain and embarrassment for her own personal behavior that led to divorce. I've heard those stories from coaches and agents and she really did her man wrong - and the whole town knew about it.

 

I agree completely. But then again, I'm still a middle-aged white guy who is naive enough to think he works in a profession where fairness, objectivity, transparency and honesty are among the tenets upon which journalism is based.

The sad reality is that it is a profession that has lost its way because it does the corporate dance to please stock holders. The analogy of whores working in a brothel is fairly close to what we have to be.

Fairness? Not if it offends certain political or business interests.
Objectivity? See answer to fairness.
Transparency? Yeah, sure, we'll publish our monetary spread sheet to show just how much money is being milked from a newspaper that is laying off employees and cutting its newshole and shit canning sections.
Honesty? How can any reader with a high school degree and just a bit of common sense not see that the "product" that lands on his lawn is costing him more and delivering less.

 

Agree with those who said the lede threw them off ... I still have no idea why you start a column writing about slayings in Washington when it's about hiding DUIs.

 

I'm just not sure why so many journalists are cool with the idea that the same standards we ask for in newsprint do not apply to newspaper blogs. And the reasoning that goes "well, I don't agree, but that's how people out there feel" isn't good enough.

If it's a part of your company's product, why does the delivery system have a sliding scale when it comes to standards of fairness as well as ethics?

The subject matter on newspaper blogs can certainly be different than the newspaper because you're dealing with an audience that's hungry for as much information as possible, and the tone might be different because the audience might be younger and less likely to be offended, but your standards should be the same. It's still your company's product. And as much as we might desperately want to grab some of that wacky, zany, the-Internet-is-the-Wild-Wild West! crowd, abandoning what we stand for isn't the way to do it.

I say this speaking generally, not about this blog item. I would have been fine with Canzano writing a column about this, save, perhaps, the line about Ms. Bellotti's hobo breath.

But if you think he shouldn't have written it and the newspaper should have done a news story instead, don't turn around and say "but I'm ok with it going in his Oregonian blog." That doesn't make sense.

 

In my early 20s I worked for a fairly large, mainstream daily that deliberately and with full approval from upper management used the word "fuck" in print. The thinking was that the story needed that touch of realism and authenticity that could be conveyed only with verbatim quotes from the people in the story.

It was tempting to insert in the National League roundup the next day "ATLANTA -- Dale Murphy hit the shit out the ball and it landed over the fucking fence, giving the host Braves the victory over St. Louis," but even at that age I knew the powers that be were going to belatedly evaluate whether taking the low road wound up costing us more than it bought us.

So what do we really gain from blogs crafted almost exclusively by very conventional people -- which is what 95 percent of newspaper writers are -- trying to appear unfettered by corporate masters? Shock value? Street cred? I doubt it. And even if we did, at what cost?

 

First, this is indeed a great discussion.

1) Frank, we'll agree to (slightly) disagree on how much editing should be done to blogs. At my place, pretty much every blog entry is read by an editor, but that's a function of the production process more than anything. Our writers don't have access to our production tools, so they have to go through the hands of somebody in here, although they don't get the two reads a column does. But I WISH writers could do their own entries, and I think it might be possible in our next generation of production tools. Hoping it is.

But understand: We're not abdicating editorial responsibility in any case. Every writer understands that there are standards of accuracy and fairness, and they're presumably mature professionals. Yes, they push the envelope (with our blessing; there are things on our site I wouldn't have considered remotely possible 10 years into my career).

But like it or not, the immediacy is important. That's the nature of the business now. Something happens, people come to the site for immediate reactions, either from our writers and their blogs, or immediate columns or on the community boards (don't even get me started on some of the content there).

What I DON'T want is a blog item coming in, getting into a queue with 20 other pieces of content and sitting there waiting for two editors to get them read. Like it or not, in my corner of the media universe, that just doesn't work anymore.

Finally, SockPuppet, in my experience -- not just here -- blogs (even those done by places like mine, or newspapers) is some of the least-beholden-to-corporate-interests content anywhere.

 

Don't know if someone's brought this up already, but anyone think maybe Belotti's wife was emboldened to do this by the Gundy situtation? Pains me to think so, but you'd be surprise in the logic people will use.

 

It's interesting and thought-provoking to read so many well-reasoned posts coming at this issue from any number of different directions.

And it's especially nice that this hasn't degenerated into name calling and insults like so many topics have.

Well played, one and all.

 

As a reader, I thought the blog entry was great fun.

As an editor, I would have edited it to take out the personal attacks (and I don't like to edit blogs)

As a writer, I would not have written it at all unless she were still co-habitating with the coach. That takes it beyond the angry mom tirade.

 

Don't know if it makes a difference in how teams handle walk-on players vs. scholarship players, in terms of announcing suspensions etc.
And apparently it isn't a big topic of discussion in Oregon, now 50 minutes into the leading local sports talk show on "The Fan" and not a whiff of Canzano's column/blog.

 

He may not be able to "control" her, but he could always tell her there are more constructive ways of making her opinion known, especially around a bunch of children.

 

I'm between the two generations and split how I get my news and information: Blogs and non-newspaper Web sites for snark/fun/niche chatter (the real estate bubble, for instance) and newspaper sites for news, reasonable columns and event coverage. I rarely read our own site's blogs and am saddened that the same standards we apply to our "regular" content is compromised by barely edited, poorly written blog material.