Jones gives good blog?

Not that it excuses this particular post of his (or the Arnold one), but how many of you have actually read much of John's work? On his good days, he does do good journalism--of a very different form than Jones's--and has aggressively fought for the disclosure of public information, something I'd imagine most journalists support. The ad hominem attacks don't necessarily seem grounded in reality.

 

So one shouldn't skewer a writer for a single, small throwaway piece? Noted.

 

Which writer and piece are you talking about?

 

"Ad hominem"?

 

E.g. http://gawker.com/5824413/gawker-v-christie

Cook did time at the Chicago Tribune too, if I'm not mistaken. (That's where I first saw his byline, at least.) I mention it because I really do hate whenever our sour little inner Murray Chasses come out to slime anyone working in BLOGS!!!ville. The folks at Gawker or SBNation or The Big Lead or wherever aren't an incomprehensibly anomic alien-hipster species. Shit, some of them - like Cook - are real journalists, just like you and me. They just work for businessmen whose boundaries and expectations are different from those of our own bosses.

(The Big Ragu up there mentioned the Daulerio experiment. I'll take those clickbaiting posts any day over my old newpaper's equivalents - Parade Magazine, the god-awful Sunday features page, etc etc. At least they're whoring themselves out to readers, not advertisers.)

 

Zeke gets this exactly right.

Seeing as how ad hominem means an attempt to negate a truth about a person by pointing out a negative characteristic of the person making the argument I guess I can assume you believe what Cook said is "true" and that Chris really was penning a not-so-subtle plea to his wife that she needs to "fuck him better."

As for what I wrote, I'm quite confident it was grounded in far, far more truth than what Cook wrote about the Joneses, and it was intended to sting when he saw it, and I'm confident it did, even if just a little. He seemed to confirm as much on Twitter. (It was a real shame when I went all Gawker on a Gawker writer, wasn't it? I still managed to keep his wife out of it.)

I'm glad Cook is frequently a believer in good journalism. It's a shame, if he's so talented, he had to resort to petty bullying. Maybe getting slapped a little in return will remind him of why he claimed to join Gawker in the first place, because he wanted to do something a little better than defame people for petty reasons, or even worse, because there is nothing better out there to comment on on a Wednesday.

 

That's the problem with people who write for the Internet (ital).

 

The ability to string words together in a sensible order and display them for public viewing does not equal journalism.

 

My problem with that kid—apart from his smug sense of entitlement—is that he thinks that all we might desire in this world is some arbitrary hit count that quantifies success: that, in fact, we must be filled with jealousy because John Cook wrote a post that got 84,000 hits or whatever it is. I'm old and naive enough to believe that kids might still get into this business because they want to make good and important work, not because they can shit on people and get their nickels and little cubicle adrenaline rushes in exchange.

I hate any notion that journalism has become some kind of slot machine, and I especially hate it when young journalists think that way, and I especially, especially hate it when young journalists think they're doing their careers any favors by being snarky little assholes, because that's what someone like John Cook leads them to believe they need to be.

I know it's easy to make fun of me, and I know I invite a lot of this stuff on myself, but I will always fight against this fucking shit, because I have this perhaps ridiculous notion that some young writer, somewhere, might see this and decide to do something better with his or her life than be a click whore for someone like A.J. Daulerio. Even if that kid exists only in my imagination, it's worth it to me. If that kid is Alexander C. Kaufman—if he thought for one minute in the last 12 hours, gee, maybe I shouldn't piss all over the profession that I desire to join, maybe that's not the wisest career strategy—then great. But I suspect he's too far gone, and so I'll save my bawling for the aspirational kids out there who still have a chance.

 

A strong damn point, to which I'd add an addendum: Producing actual journalism at one point doth not a sheen of journalism over all future works create.

 

Are you saying this because you're familiar with Cook's work and find it wanting? Or are you saying this because it's easier to call him a moral monster than to acknowledge that maybe he's in the same line of work that you are?

(It's funny, BTW, to watch people - Jones included - treat the Esquire story like a forgivably tossed-off anomaly while arguing that Cook's 400 words constitute the ne plus ultra of his work.)