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Dec

11

The meanest thing I’ve ever read in the PD


Was this column by Dick Feagler, published today.

And I thought I should tell a few people just how I feel (following letter sent to Brent Larkin, Doug Clifton, letters editor, Dick Feagler and Ted Diadiun):

Dear Sirs,

I’m an award-winning freelance writer, columnist and contributing editor for Cleveland Family, Storyteller for the KnowledgeWorks Foundation (I follow the Euclid small schools effort), 43 year old mother of three children, wife to one husband, Marcus Leadership Fellow at my synagogue and I have a joint degree in law and social work (which I used for eight years at Bellefaire JCB). As you might suspect, I do things in my kids’ schools and try to stay active in local civic endeavors as well.

I can even tell you that in May 2002, Mr. Larkin actually accepted on spec and then published an op-ed, written by me, that resulted from the very first pitch I ever made to anyone. It analogized mental health professionals’ duty to warn to the federal government’s duty to warn. (I’m also grateful to The Plain Dealer for publishing a few other pieces of my work, all essays or op-eds, since that time, including one that had me blushing last May because of its prominence. I’ve had nothing but excellent experiences with the PD editors and staff I know personally and professional.)

But, gentlemen, I’m also a blogger. You can verify this by visiting my blog at http://www.writeslikeshetalks.blogspot.com/, and you can also ask Henry Gomez and John Campanelli about the blog. (Mr. Campanelli even included something written by me as the very first entry in today’s PDQ). I thank them both for repeatedly referencing me and certain portions of my work.

I’m writing this letter to you because Mr. Feagler’s column today is the most unnecessarily mean-spirited piece of writing I’ve read in your paper, ever.

Now, I know that some of the mean-spiritedness might be due to Mr. Feagler’s lack of an editor on the piece (as he says in the column). I don’t have a good guess on that.

But here are some of the reasons why, in my opinion, the column is mean just for the sake of being mean:

1. Mr. Feagler generalizes to the point of excluding all meritorious work in the blogosphere, of which there is an abundance.

For example, maybe you are familiar with New Voices, a project of J-Lab, The Institute for Interactive Journalism, located at the University of Maryland and “supported with grants from John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. Some New Voice projects involve community-oriented blogs.

At October’s SPJ conference (the same at which Judy Miller received her First Amendment award amid controversy), I attended two sessions presented by J-Lab’s director. Both dealt with citizen journalism and blogs, among other topics.

But you do not need to go past Meet the Bloggers, an endeavor which seemed so foreign even to me that I finally decided to attend the most recent interview conducted under its auspices. (I’ve written this and this about my experience there.) Then there are blogs associated with The Plain Dealer such as Chas Rich’s award-winning NEOBabble, that demonstrate the quality in local examples.

2. Mr. Feagler’s tone implies that he does not trust readers to be able to discern truth from fiction. Again, such an assertion is just plain mean, in addition to wrong. For example, parents are often counseled to give their kids responsibility in order to make them be responsible. Why isn’t this the same with someone who gathers information from a variety of sources? Why does Mr. Feagler have so little trust in those who read not only blogs or newspapers, but his column?

3. Mr. Feagler’s column fails to use a balanced approach to make his point. He makes no reference or concession to the Jayson Blair – Stephen Glass or even Doris Kearns Goodwin-type errors that have plagued mainstream media. He never mentions how many and how often corrections are published in newspapers. He picks on one medium’s agreed to weaknesses, but fails to discuss the weaknesses in his preferred medium. That’s unfair and bullying.

4. Mr. Feagler equates his “worry about how little some of you value that morning newspaper out on the driveway in the snow” with the existence and proliferation of blogs, but provides no evidence of any causal relationship between the two. I’m not very familiar with the newspaper publishing industry (as much as I loved Katherine Graham’s autobiography). But my understanding is that the decline in readers referring to that morning paper began long before the birth of blogs.

Again, I view this allusion of Mr. Feagler’s to be an unnecessarily mean implication.

5. Columns written in the manner of this column by Mr. Feagler spread ill-will. You read it and you come away with a nasty feeling, no matter who you are. Where is the value and justification in that? There’s so much ugliness in so many other places we read about or observe humankind. What good could possibly come – for the PD, the media or the readers – from being so unkind?

6. Finally, Mr. Feagler calls the newspaper “still your best bet when it comes to trying to tell the truth in print.” That seems like an awfully low threshold itself. My “best bet”? When it comes to “trying to tell the truth in print”?

If Mr. Feagler would like to assert opinions about the causes of the decline in newspaper readership, he should do that. If he wants to assert opinions about how blogs contribute to that decline, then he should do that. If he wants to expose the potential for misuse of blogs as an exciting but unedited way for people to be engaged in what’s happening around them, then he should do that.

But to completely, without exception, malign blogs and bloggers – especially given the vibrancy of the NEO blogosphere, and the support (thank you) that the PD has given to several of those in the NEO blogosphere – well, that sounds to me, as someone who has had a subscription to the PD for years and has often told others how shocked she is that they don’t get the main local paper, just plain mean.

Thank you very much for reading my letter, and for your support of my writing over the years. I hope that perhaps Mr. Feagler’s column, as mean as I feel it sounds, could at least be an opportunity to blow the cover off of the relationship between different media modes and find a way that all modes can enhance how the news readers read is provided.

Period.

Very truly yours,

Jill Miller Zimon, JD, MSSA

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 12:37 pm December 11th, 2005 in Politics 

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