I agree it absolutely did not have to be that way and if anyone could have made the case with tact and diplomacy it would have been you (my this apple is shiny!)

So we are left to deduce why it did not. And I accept your version of events completely. And I see how deeply this troubles you and I commiserate completely. I felt the same way for weeks, nay months after I was fired from my talk radio job. Even a year later I would dream very vividly that I was back running the board and wake up angry and sad. It’s clear you greatly enjoyed WOB and saw it as a golden opportunity to merge the worlds of print and blog for the benefit of all the readers. And now we’re all left to look at the shattered pieces of what could have been and it plain stinks to high hell. And its got to hurt a lot.

Like you I hope for a better world and am willing to work for it. But sometimes it just seems like were too tiny a boat against the tide.

But even in my non-delusional state of being, I still believe we could have worked this out – if they really wanted to.

Either they didn’t want to or they f**d up, or both. No matter how you slice it, the value of any ethics standard, for bloggers or journalists, is diminished the way they tried to use it with us.

Again, it just did not have to be that way.

Oh yes, I agree with that and heaven knows I did try and try and try and failed and failed and failed.

Ok, I will accept that I may lack the tact necessary to change things from within but this is a system that does not (in many cases, I won’t make sweeping statements here) accept the validity of personal ethical codes. There are corporate ethical codes and the feeling that I always got was that you accept them or move on – they are not going to change simply because you might make what you consider a very principled and convincing argument to the contrary. And, of course, I was not the only one. But ask yourself Jill, in the recent Wide Open Blog dustup, if you had 15 minutes alone with Susan Goldberg and Brent Larkin and whoever else to make your best case, do you think the final decision would have been any different?

At some point some of us stop beating our heads against the wall because it does truly feel better when we stop.

I apologize for sounding as though I think everyone has choices – of course I know better – it isn’t always possible, maybe even often it isn’t possible.

But don’t we want to encourage people to TRY to improve their circumstances?

I think that’s right. Journalists who got into the business because they wanted to make a difference in the world (and why is there anything wrong with that?) largely feel that way. I know I did. But the inter-newsroom politics eventually ejected me from a job I genuinely loved. I simply don’t think a true progressive can function as a reporter in a newsroom anymore because of the corporate culture permeating every facet of the operation. To sound like David Mamet – we all become whores in this situation. I knew those who had years in the business stretching back to the better days who are hanging on in a situation they hate just to make it to retirement. I think some of them are shortening their lives with the resultant stress. I think I would probably work best in an alternative newspaper situation but every one I ever applied to I was never called for an interview. I wonder if they have a bias against people who have been in the mainstream too long?

I ask this because when I meet and talk with traditional journalists, they may talk about loving their work, but I don’t know if they love their JOB. You know what I mean?

What do you think?

I think you are exactly right that it is not so much about left and right as it is about protecting and supporting the powerful versus advocating on behalf of the powerless, in the sense of exposing the injustices that are frequently at the root of their powerlessness. Are altweeklies biased? Sure, absolutely — about exactly as much as papers like the Plain Dealer? They just tend to take a different side (leaving out the “modern” stance some have adopted of being cynical about everything. The PD protects institutions and businesses such as Forest City, the Cleveland Clinic and the Cleveland Catholic Diocese while acting like a pack of especially unpleasant martinets in lecturing the black community and our region’s poorer citizens for not maintaining and policing middle-class behavior on a frayed shoestring (sorry, no more bootstraps; they’ve long since been take away).

I’ve been away from Cleveland for 10 years and noticed that Mark was gone. I’m sorry to hear of what has become of his efforts.

It always amazed me that the best journalism at ground level was being done by the Free Times and other so-called alternative weeklies. The argument I used to get into with other mainstream journalists I worked with was the whole bias issue with the weeklies. Of course, the MSM writers decried what they say as ‘bias.’ For my part my defense of the alternative weeklies was they were doing the kind of journalism that WE should be doing but are afraid to do for reasons which, after the latest dustup with the PD should seem all too obvious. Muckraking, to use the term in a positive sense, never had to necessarily be about the right or the left but about finding out the truth of situations that were adverse to the public. Now that kind of journalism is assailed as being left-wing, which I would take as a compliment. Was Upton Sinclair a left winger? Well, Teddy Roosevelt supposedly hated him but got the Pure Food and Drug Act passed largely because of what came out in The Jungle. To be a progressive is to expose that which hurts the public in any form. Consequently, is the opposite type of journalism that which protects the ownership class or the status quo? If so, what do we call that type of journalism? Can we call it journalism at all?

Ooooh, sorry, I seem to have launched into a roundtable type diatribe. But these questions fascinate me and we don’t talk about them enough.