Jemele apologizes

Michael Wilbon among others would take exception to that.

 

To be honest, I don't read Jemele regularly and I don't have much to say on her.
The examples of her posted work here have all been uniformly bad.
I have a limited amount of time to read random things and Jemele doesn't make the cut. Espn.com doesn't either.
If you think she sucks, don't click, someone will notice sooner or rater that nobody is reading and a decision will be made then.
I won't click on her column now, because I don't think it deserves the page view, unique visitor, unique IP address or however the hell ESPN counts.
I swear to God, if as many people who bitch about ESPN, quit watching or reading, then it would go away.
The one exception being my man Jones, who at last report was going to be doing some work for them, but I haven't seen anything yet.

 

If Jones starts writing for ESPN, I'm subscribing.

 

my apologies to good buds like mike wilbon. i misspoke. meant to say "the best african-american columnist ESPN could find."

carry on.

 

http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3382818
click, print and read

 

Do you realize, however, how many cultural and educational obstacles have to be overcome before they can ever even dream of getting to that point, though?

I get your drift, I do. But I think that we're overestimating here how treacherous the path is before they ever get to the point at which their path is "paved with gold."

And I'm speaking as a white male who has, at many moments of weakness, cursed affirmative action-style hiring for torpedoing my ambitions. Hell, I even had a female newsroom editor, just this year, tell me, "Well, your opportunities in this business are going to be very slim, being a white male." She wasn't being sarcastic, either.

All of this being said, I have about had it up to here with the "Come strong or don't come at all!" brand of column punditry.

 

That's kinda true and kinda not.

Frankly, minority journalists are exploited by some of largest newspapers/news organizations, who bring them in without much respect as to whether they're ready for a high-profile responsibility. Some of these journalists are thrown into the deep end, they're fair but not spectacular, and within two years they’re out of the business because nobody has bothered to mentor them or give them appropriate assignments.

Young journalists out of college are still young journalists out of college. Sticking them on the business beat at a 200,000+ circulation paper right out of the gate isn’t really looking out for a minority's best interest.

 

I understand that by never bringing up Hitler, we then forget him and marginalize him. But under what traditional sports context (excluding, say, a track star fleeing from state-sponsored genocide) is the reference in good taste?

 

Here's a hint. Jemele Hill just gave us a good example of when not to do it.

 

There's a loaded baked potato.

 

Jemele is good on TV.

Rachel Alexander, meanwhile, looks like an over-made-up corpse most of the time and has an awful delivery. But....she CAN write.

As long as it ain't about Mike Lange.

 

Folks... it AIN'T just ESPN.

How many dedicated copy editors do your papers have to edit the stuff going online (including blogs) during the daylight hours?

The copy editor is the most woefully underappreciated entity out there right now.