Pondering the reader-assisted PayPal junket to Denver one blogger, of hundreds expected to cover both political conventions, I am pressed to consider citizen journalism once again.
It strikes me that bloggers are yearning to break out of isolation and into the scrum, whereas any real reporter who has scored either a very influential or very unforgettable story is yearning to break away from the scrum. It is my experience that any reporter who does, and has the stones and the news judgment to do it, and who sojourns far away from the places where photo opportunities and press conferences are construed as news, is the reporter who gets the story.
Wanting to be part of the scrum, I submit, is a necessity for those whose ambitions require face time on the networks or a front page byline. My observation is that people for whom entree is important -- the newshens, for example, of the Helen Thomas, Fran Lewine, Sarah McClendon, Dorothy McCardle generation for whom mere entree to the profession was a terrible struggle -- divorcees, unwed mothers, "perennial bacholorettes" of the 1940s and 1950s whose real stories probably won't ever be told -- treasure this work, which is stenography. So too do the television network reporters, who -- just to invoke a chimera of what their values might be -- consider subbing on the Today Show a promotion from covering the White House. Anybody who has been herded into a roped-off press section by junior press aides and force-fed pap for thirty seconds will be able to decide whether or not the job is for you.
I doubt the bloggers will be given entree even to these pools. They can't take notes without their computers, and that's pretty hard to do when the AP photographer is whacking you upside the head with his telephoto lens because you blocked his shot. He does that because at any moment the President could be assassinated and he needs to have that shot. Just so's you know what the White House -- or the Teddy Kennedy beat -- is really about.
The bloggers aren't going to get anywhere near the candidate or even the scrum. Since it seems to me that that -- the entree -- is what they really want I can't see that the whole enterprise is serving any purpose. You can tap on your laptop about what's going on on television at home just as well, if not better, than you can in a bloggers' newsroom where I suspect they'll all be quarantined, and bribed with free Krispy Kremes, as far as possible away from the action the organizers of the Event can put them. Their "press credentials", I suspect, will not permit them on the convention floor to mingle with the delegates or to wangle an invitation into any backroom arm-twisting, if mayhem so vigorous is still permitted at Events, that might be going on. I think their "credentials" will serve instead to curtail, as is traditional, any access whatsoever.
Here's the thing with citizen journalism. My sense is that they all want to cover the celebrity rat fuck events -- the backstage pass rock concert mentalilty -- like the political conventions, which are eponymously the locus of everything that is not news.
It seems to me the really memorable and influential stories have always been discovered by an experienced and driven reporter working on his own, usually way off the beaten path. My Lai -- Hersh didn't even have an employer.
Watergate -- Woodward and Bernstein worked far from the White House press room, and did not, to my knowledge, possess White House credentials during Watergate (as I did).
I was just reading about the black power salute story of 1968 -- Smith and Carlos have never been forgiven by the Olympic committee -- and caught a glimpse of what a great reporter would be doing during one of those ratfucks, the Olympics, which, like the White House or the political conventions, is the cynosure of all eyes.
Walking to the medal platform were Smith, Carlos, Mrs. Smith, who for some reason had a black glove in each of her hands, and Pete Axthelm. Nobody else.
(Yalie, dead of "liver disease" at 47, one apotheosis of my theory that nothing is harder to write well about than sports.)
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/08/23/opinion/opart_inline.jpg
There is Ron Suskind, who is the very model of a pomo reporter, and the recorder of the epoch-marking sentence from -- it had to be Rove -- "We're an empire now" -- one of those laser-eyed guys who parlayed the daily front page byline into what it was worth -- a lifetime of book contracts. The first book he did was not one of his scathing political tomes, but one following a black kid through high school in Washington, D.C.. Slavery, as everybody knows, is the true story of the democracy, and Suskind used his entree to write about that. On his own, far away from the front page of the Wall Street Journal and all their very stupid shit.
There is Tina Rosenberg, who was travelling to Medellin and hanging with the Sendero Luminoso thugs, protected only by a MacArthur Foundation grant, about which, I have to tell you, the coqueros care less than nothing. She did it when no white boy would be seen dead covering Latin America which is still, pretty much, except for those who've married Cariocas, Siberia for foreign correspondents.
Finally, there is the classic Jimmy Breslin story -- the interview with Clifton Pollard, JFK's grave digger. This is a story that will last forever, unlike the thousands of others filed that day.
No citizen journalist I know of is interested in, or has the stones, or the news judgment, to go out into the meatspace world and do what these maniacs do.
I need to remember that.
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