Willybuns blasts "jealous" Style writers

The original review was not satire. I don't think that's a matter of debate. It was a harsh, though I would argue honest, critique of Tony's performance. Frankly, the Post probably should have done what the NYT does, which is hire someone from outside the paper to freelance the review. Selena Roberts got blasted within the pages of the Grey Lady for her book about Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs, and she didn't throw a little fit about it.

The second review was simply mocking the entire situation, mostly Tony's reaction to the original rip job. And while the mind does boggle as to how anyone could look at it and consider it anything but an attempt to be funny, as my man Flying Headbutt points out, these are D.C. people we're dealing with.

As a small aside, a good friend of mine works at the Post, and he told me that every day the paper gets torn to shreds by writers and editors on the Post's internal message board as part of its daily critique. You wouldn't believe, he said, the amount of bitching that goes on, with people going to considerable lengths to find even the smallest flaws with otherwise exceptional stories. It's a cutthroat environment, with a lot of people perfectly willing to stab others in the back and twist the knife with a smile on their face, but it's also manages to produce some great journalism.

 

It was half-baked satire inside half-baked satire. (Weingarten used to be Tony's editor for the Style column, so it was also an inside joke.) It didn't work as satire, and it for sure didn't work for the unfamiliar-with-Weingarten reader who dropped in expecting another serious review.

 

The Weingarten piece was obvious satire, and it's sad that so many apparently didn't get it. The original Fahri piece was fair, though I disagreed with his assessment of TK's performance. But seeing as how it was on deadline for a game that went 8-11 p.m., you had to wonder whether Fahri went in there with any preconceived agenda.

That said, I was kind of surprised to see Wilbon attack Fahri like that, because that's not his schtick. He may have just been sticking up for TK, who's one of his best friends in the world. But I would tend to agree with Wilbon's assessment of the mentality of those style writers, thumbing their nose at sportswriters without realizing what a hard job it can be. And by the way, Fahri has not been shy in the past about trying to wiggle his way into doing sports-related stories. Look at that in any way you'd like.

 

Top-10 reasons Features and metro hate us:

1. We get a lot of travel.
2. We get a lot of travel to cover fun and games.
3. They know we get computer bags and golf shirts and other stuff.
4. We get good free food on most occasions (There is no Auburn pregame football meal equivilent at a city council meeting).
5. We're better on deadline than they are, and in many cases, better writers. Simply the way the industry has evolved. They know it. They hate it.
6. They know we scoff at their balls to the wall frenzy on primary election nights, when they've got a small army in the office and spread out at campaign headquarters, and 40 pizzas waiting for them, when it reality it's less work than an average prep football night, which we handle with half the manpower, in the office and out in the field.
7. The best among us (Tony K., Wilbon, the ATH guys) get book gigs and Monday Night Football. Hell if the worst of us can't get a radio show, we're not trying.
8. Our work ethic puts them to shame. We have features writers who do one piece a month. They stroll into the office at 10 a.m., leave for lunch at 11:30, back at 1, take 27 soda machine breaks, make the cubicle stroll to gossip, and are out the door in time for happy hour.
9. We get a lot of free golf.
10. We could do their job....they couldn't do ours.

 

Hondo, good points.

The best of the best features writers get 10 times more access than we'll ever get in our lifetimes, though. Would I rather be a mid-level pro beat writer or Charles E. Pierce writing the GQ/Esquire story on Tiger? Latter, please.

 

Hondo:

The thing about one features piece a month is entertaining, but most of the rest of that is just smoke-filled, coffeehouse crap.

No offense.

 

That's one way to look at it. Another way to see it is that great newspapers do more than pat themselves on the back; there is an established venue for the kind of self-questioning that makes them even better. I've worked on a couple papers that did this. It raised the tension level somewhat, but I think we put out the best newspapers of their size at the time, and the in-house critiques were part of it. They did more than pick apart flawed stories, they were primers to the staff on how we got the story, why the story was done that way and what we learned during the process of producing the story -- things to watch out for in the future.

I've seen San Jose's, where anyone in the newsroom can contribute and say whatever they want as long as they'll sign their name. I have to admire a newsroom with that kind of intellectual honesty.

Hank Stuever did a brilliantly funny and true critique of The Washington Post that was linked to by a lot of people after someone leaked it to The New York Observer; unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available online anymore, but I saved a copy:

Hank Stuever, Style reporter

First my screed, then my critique. (Sorry, that's how it goes, and it might
run long - I might not get another chance at so many eyeballs.) This forum
seems to have a lot of focus-group fallout, calling for: shorter stories,
faster formats, oh my it's all too much to handle, I can't possibly read it
all, I don't know where to start, I get everything I need from my (pet
electronic doodad). And, my favorite, from a critique a couple of days ago,
the assistant news editor guy who reads the NYT, WSJ (so navigable! Huh?),
then gets online and reads everything else, and then and only then might
deign to read The Post, which is, again, too this and too that and is an
incredible intrusion on his time. Remarkably, the paychecks navigate their
way to his bank account every other Friday, which is another way for me to
say that I firmly, firmly believe that if you can be bothered to work here,
you can bother to read this paper - the meatspace version, not the Web, the
printed result that we all worked so hard to make -- every day before you
read someone else's. This is why I can never be allowed to observe focus
groups: I will surely bust through that one-way glass window and administer
hard spankings to each and every participant who seems incapable of just
paging through a newspaper, looking at headlines and pictures, and deciding
whether or not there's something worth stopping on.

I think we've overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet
insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A
newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am
happy when it doesn't include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Then again, no one is interested in my new slogan for The Post: "News Flash:
Everything's Not Always About You."

Why are we obsessed with the paper being too much, too large? Our
counterparts at McDonalds, Google, iTunes, Comcast Digital, The Cheesecake
Factory and Barnes & Noble have already learned: People do not complain
because something is too big and they can't possibly read, listen to, watch
or eat it all in one sitting. (American consumers so rarely seem to be
saying this, except in newspaper focus groups. Otherwise, they seem to enjoy
being overwhelmed.)

I have worked at newspapers that fretted, angsted and test-marketed all
sorts of "news you can use" and entry points and time-savers. We added
geegaws, rails, skyboxes, refers, breakouts, sidebars; we set the articles
in ragged-right and whacked the living shit out of them. It helped not one
bit, but this identity crisis ultimately created a paper you really could
read in 10 minutes. And soon enough, it started to feel like something that
wasn't worth the 50 cents they charge for it.

So I really do reach for my air-sickness bag when we start passing around
prototypes of a redesigned A1 with rails and time-savers, and an AME wonders
(in yesterday's critique) if it might be good idea execute a blanket
reduction in story lengths. If we want to redesign the paper to make it look
like the coolest thing on the planet, fine, that's an image crisis I can
live with. I prefer that if we do, the aesthetic end result reminds me of
walking into the Apple Store, and not of a bulletin board in a middle school
social-studies classroom.

They will never let me do this critique again.

 

Actually, no it's not. Every point I made evolved from a personal experience...either things verbalized to me by other writers in all departments, or things I've observed. The election night things continues to amuse me. Our primary election is next Tuesday, and they're already having huge planning meetings and in general acting as if they're going to be covering the apocolypse. Meanwhile, 99 percent of the races could be called right now, so it's not like there's going to be any late-night mystery to who the Democratic primary winner in the state attorney race will be.

 

Not to digress or point at Hondo, because a lot of sports folks think this...but I hate that notion.

Sports is a specialty, politics is a specialty, news is a specialty...there's nothing easy about any of it.

 

Broad generalization? Yep.

Generous ladles of truth, in it? Damn straight.

 

Fair points, all, Frank. To clarify, I think it's good for even the best writers and reporters to hear that, yes, their shit does, occasionally, stink. It's absolutely admirable, too, that people on the Post's internal message board have to sign their name. Maybe it's because I'm a huge nerd, but I find the breakdown of how a story came together fascinating, and it's a shame we can't get more writers we all hold in high regard to come on here and talk about "the process." (It obvious, though, why it can't happen. Within an hour, we'd have people telling Gary Smith that you overwrite, your style doesn't work for them, and hey, does you even do all your own interviews? If I had six months to work on a story, blah, blah, blah. Who wants to put themselves through something like that, even if 95 percent of it would be postive?)

Stuever though, in some respects, makes my point for me. You can nitpick and tear down everything on some level, even Pulitzer stories, trying to please all of the people all of the time, and often what you're left with is literary gruel: tasteless, odorless, inoffensive sentences without texture or life. Stir in an occasional pinch of jealousy and ambition, two things that definitely come into play at the biggest papers like the Post, and an internal critque becomes a bit of a mixed bag.

I cannot, however, express clearly enough how much I enjoy Stuever. (So glad he's back from his time off.) That critique is as fresh today as it was two years ago when I read it for the first time.

His recent essay about MTV and its 25 year anniversary was razor sharp.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/31/AR2006073101296.html