Category: new frontiers in journalistic obsequiousness

The Day The Journalists Cried

Michael Lenehan of the Chicago Reader is sad. Sad because no one, apparently, is reading newspapers anymore. Which actually means that newspapers aren't making as much money as they used to make, in his opinion, but never mind that. He's got a laundry list of people who've done the industry in, including Craig Newmark and his Craigslist, EBay, Google Base and naturally, bloggers, all of which begs the question: how many straw men are currently employed by the Chicago Reader.

Naturally, he cites this and other blogs and "their blogging friends whose idea of a good time is giving yourself a funny name and distracting normal people who used to read newspapers." Yep, our secret was our funny name.

Actually, he seems most pissed at the fact that bloggers take news stories and then do what the reporters seem unable to do -- make them interesting. He angrily cites a single occasion where this blog failed to cite attribution to his satisfaction and especially seems aggrieved that we take holidays. "Wonkette doesn’t do weekends," snivels Lenehan. Well, speaking for ourselves, we're usually on to our third Vicodin and Sambuca milkshake by 10:30am on Saturday morning. It's a labor right for which our union has labored hard.

But to answer the point, surely Lenehan would have been better served to consider as evidence of blog wrongdoing a story that wasn't traded back and forth between his brethren in newsprint like a cheap whore: "The Yahoo story came from the Associated Press, which had picked it up from the Houston Chronicle...for the record, the Chronicle story was written by a Washington bureau reporter named Samantha Levine", and now it makes it's latest appearance as the backbone to whatever point Lenehan takes his sweet ass time in making. Weekends? Everyday is a weekend when "reporting" means "scanning the wires and regurgitating."

This all builds up to Lenehan's modest proposal:

Today, therefore, I am proposing a yearlong journalism strike. I am urging reporters and editors around the world to put down their notebooks, close their laptops, hang up their phones . Lie down and be counted! Let’s have no reporting, no editing, no application of any human intelligence whatsoever to events public or private till January 1, 2007. I’m calling it the Year Without Journalism.

This is definitely something we could get behind, but based upon the article we read last week by Peter Baker and Jim VandenHei, we were kind of under the impression that journalists had already taken a year off.— DCEIVER

PS: For the sake of attribution, we first became aware of Lenehan's article thanks to the blogger known as Rambling Rhodes, who titles his post Quick, call a Waaaahhhmbulance! Lenehan couldn't have said it better himself. In fact, he didn't.

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