Kindred on Albom receiving this year's Red Smith Award

Que?

 

Marge Schott on Albom: "He was good in the beginning, but he went too far.'

 

Two words.
Bull. Crap.
The fact I do not swear online -- I'm a sailor when I'm in everyday speech -- prevents me from making that point more firmly.
I do not take short cuts. Ever. I do my job the way I'm supposed to. I don't lie, cheat or steal.
The game ends and I've got to have a story in there? It's all mine. And it's the best I can make it.

 

I agree twoback. There are plenty of people in this business who have not "taken shortcuts," or the more accurate, plagiarized or fictionalized, their work. Many, many hard-working journalists manage to do great work every day without doing any of these things. And many, many of those are not lionized or given national journalism awards or paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or worshipped for their "success."

 

Every person who has ever taken a quote off a quote sheet has taken a shortcut, albeit a minor one.

You likely did not hear this quote, but you are reporting it as if you did.

Every newspaper has canned obits. They are shortcuts. Sometimes they accidentally get published. See Bloomberg, Steve Jobs, Obit.

There are about 23,000 other shortcuts we take. Sorry, we do. It's nothing to be ashamed about. Really.

 

I wish Whitlock would stop with the notion that if only more people were as clever and gutsy as he and Bill Simmons, newspapers would thrive. They are talented guys who write a lot of good stuff. Neither is nearly as ground-breaking or edgy as many believe.

 

I wouldn't even say either of them are especially talented.

Do they fill a niche? Sure, I guess. Who doesn't, though?

 

Odd that Whitlock would defend a guy like Bill Simmons who, let's face it, would have folded like a cheap tent for whatever team he covered on a beat.

I don't mind Simmons, but goodness. He's a writer. That's all the hell he is. And he isn't half as good of a writer as Albom, whether Albom fictionalized the damn creation of the universe. I don't give two poops, frankly, for any of Albom's fiction work, but I'd love to see what Bill Simmons conjures up for a screenplay. Hollywood is, uh, still waiting, Bill.

Simmons would have been a lap dog as a beat writer. That he wasn't faced to confront <i>any</i> of the people he ripped until <i>years</i> after he'd gained a following is crucial to his development. Imagine all the things you'd write if you could drone on endlessly impugning someone's intelligence or integrity without several years worth of recourse. One of the reasons Internet writers have gained traction is for this very reason; from a safe distance, they can fire off Grinch shots that everyday reporters can't, if only because a guy like Urban Meyer can stick his finger in their face and call them a "bad guy" in front of cameras, or because the way some teams are anymore, if you don't kiss serious ass, some 24-year-old noob with a hard-on for being a prick will take his assistant media relations job and shove it up your rear end.

That's not to defend Albom's nonsense, because half of his stuff is schmaltz, and yeah, he's buzzcut some corners. But it is to say this: Let's not pretend that we can ditch narrative journalism for 3,000-word dispatches of "Watchin LSU football with Ragin B. Cajun!" Nobody saying Simmons doesn't work hard or have in hand in a variety of projects. But try calling a source at 12:30 at night instead of your Dad.

 

This is garbage.
So if I use the official statsheet, that's a shortcut, because I didn't keep track of the numbers myself.
If I use the information in a press release, that's a shortcut, because it's not my own reporting.
All of which is equal to plagiarism, of course.

 

As I said, it's nothing to be ashamed about.

But yes, they are shortcuts.

Cover Podunk High, and you WILL be doing your own stats, and every quote in your story will be in your notebook or recorder.

Cover State U., and you'll use the shortcuts. A coach or player in the other locker room may have said something potentially controversial --- which the SID may not include when he transcribes the quotes --- but if you were not there and the competing paper was, you will not have the quote. Because you took a shortcut.

And you know damn well that "information" cannot be plagiarized. But if an SID is a clever writer, and you happen to use a phrase that he turned nicely, and the competing paper also used the same phrase . . . nobody will sue you (SIDs WANT their information to be used by as many people as possible). But you'll just look stupid.

 

This is preposterous. There is a huge difference between quote sheets and press releases handed to everyone covering an event and literally lifting someone's writing out out of the paper or off the wires and passing it off as your own. And there's an ever bigger difference between that and making something up out of thin air and pretending it's fact and presenting it to readers as such.

 

Never said there wasn't a difference. But like 1/16-inch marks on a ruler, some shortcuts are incrementally worse than others. From harmless to unethical to libelous to outright plagiarism, with about 1,000 marks in between the extremes.

For instance, people on here have likened what Albom did to "making stuff up out of thin air."

But that's not what he did. He interviewed two people who told him where they would be on Saturday. He set a scene that didn't just pop into his mind. It came from two interviewees whose plans changed after they were interviewed. If they do not say. "We will be there cheering", he does not write "they were there cheering."

And "there is a huge difference" in that and just dreaming everything up out of thin air one day.

But you would not know that judging by the comments of many on here. What Albom did was bad. What he's accused of doing is worse.

I happen to think Kindred's four paragraphs on Magic Johnson were much worse and more damaging than Albom's four paragraphs on Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson. But guess in whose direction 99% of the cannon fire is directed? Why? Why do we have to let personal animosity cloud our viewpoints about questionable journalism? And it's so transparent. When the criticisms of people also include shots at their height or weight or something else unrelated to journalism . . . it's kind of a giveaway.