Bristol editor gives one-fingered salute to Washington Post

Instead, we think he bashed the Post because he wished he worked there and got turned down for a job.

 

Anyone can do great journalism. It's just that you sometimes need to break free from the routine.

The challenge at most small papers is that you need to fill the damn thing. So the pressure is on to churn out copy. Spending a couple weeks working on a great story seems laughable.

At a larger paper, you may have a great enterprise idea from your beat, but the expectation is to churn our daily copy, so the idea gets put on your backburner.

In many cases, if a reporter sat down with an editor to map out a way to get the project done, they might even be sending Pulitzers to the Podunk Press.

I'd much rather discuss with a writer how I can cover his beat for a couple weeks than try to pry enterprise ideas from him.

 

No problem at all with the column .... and yes, papers like the Post do look down their noses at the rest of us out here in Podunk. Any time you can do the "how ya like me now?" dance, you should.

 

Absolutely.. it's much harder for a smaller paper to do this kind of work. But it can be done.

Earlier in my career in Oklahoma, I did an investigative series that won an Oklahoma AP award. It took me six months to report and write it because I had to do my records research at night, in between city council meetings and basketball games.

It led to a lot of off-the-clock-work, of course. But that was a good tradeoff for the story that resulted, in my eyes.

 

Being inanimate corporations, newspapers hardly ever look down their noses. I've noticed, however, that people who work at smaller outfits sometimes have esteem issues that tend to reveal themselves in situations like this. Which is what happened to the whiny columnist in this case.

 

Maybe so, but if the WaPo doesn't state that the BHC is struggling, and that its star reporter is looking for work, I'm betting that this doesn't get written.

 

Just as much as profit-taking bigwigs and clueless management, the above post illustrates why papers are in such trouble.

 

I liked it. Gave his paper a pat on the back at the same time pointing out that the big guys aren't always right in their reporting.

 

I've got to assume the the paper had taken care of the back-patting when the Pulitzer was announced.

And was there a person remaining in the United States who thought that the mainstream media is never wrong?

The piece would have been much better if it had been written from the tone of being the ones reported on and how that felt and stripped away the obvious underlying resentment.

 

His point was right on. His delivery left a little to be desired.

 

So solid, od.

I'm torn. On one hand, it feels good when someone who has been told they're not good enough or whatever gets a chance to thumb their nose at the person who told them that. On the other, the off chance that he might have been hired at the WaPo at some point in the future probably died the minute that column hit the press.