chestysite

I’m currently in the middle of watching the final season of “The Wire,” which has the newspaper industry as one of its anchoring themes. Good stuff. With that in my head in recent days, it was fun to read this last night and this early this morning.

Those links demand a truckload of grainy salt. If Whitlock and Hall end up being the flag-bearers for any kind of journalism, we’re all doomed. But does anyone not believe Hall’s cheap-pay-for-a-column story? Too weird to come up with out of nowhere, especially with an actual dollar amount. Is it all that scandalous? Not really. Whitlock is a fringe writer anyway, more concerned with the argument than the delivery. And writing your own work is probably hard when a Don Imus controversy doesn’t pop up every day.

I’ll save my outrage for the hit on JoPo. Here’s Hall:

It is why Whitlock has little respect for JoPo. Add 100 pounds to Mitch Albom, remove all but three of his hairs and you have JoPo staring you in the face with a bland, formulaic, rags-to-riches story about Buck O’Neill or Priest Holmes playing checkers (twice).

Posnanski can tell a story – yep, a schmaltzy story – when he needs to. And yes, his growth at the Star included some columns dripping with sentimentality. But the criticism is from someone (Hall) who either doesn’t read much of Joe’s mega-volume output, or he just doesn’t like him. Either way – that’s fine. Different strokes. But to pair Posnanski up with Albom, while the latter’s being criticized for BAD JOURNALISM – that makes the analysis demand a little more objectivity.

JoPo’s blog and SI features are generally smart, funny, uber-researched, argumentative, compelling and… smart. Whitlock strains to get 500 words out of his recycled (how can bring up O.J.?) topics. Hall listens to the radio (admittedly, with great devotion) and reacts in quick sentences. Neither of these guys, as writers, could hold Posnanski’s… whatever writers protect their testicles with. And seriously, this market has so little to be across-the-board proud of when it comes to sports journalism. Radio, TV and newspapers are a near-wasteland. So when good ones reside here, why spend energy tearing them down?

That’s not much of a defense, actually. But I’m not a writer. And, in varying degrees, I respect what these guys do. While I like all the inside-baseball stuff (I seek it out, obviously!), their entire discussion would be miles more persuasive if it stayed in the theoretical. Kindred’s original criticism of Albom avoided the Whitlock-ish personal stuff. I’d guess that was intentional. Cause readers can deal with the ethical questions and contradictions rather than, like I did with Whitlock’s column, spend as much time recalling JW’s sins as I did Albom’s.

Anyway, that’s what I was reading this morning. Not in a newspaper, by the way.