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News & ArtsSaturday, March 28, 2009
City / Media No Working Press
Posted by Eli Sanders on Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 11:45 AM
That was the rule being enforced last night at the Ballard Elks Lodge No. 827, where former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers and their friends and significant others all paid $10 each at the door in order to pull off the goodbye party that the Hearst Corporation wouldn't throw for them.
The rule was, in a way, apt. Given the recent mass layoffs at the P-I, most people at the party, were, in fact, no-working press. But it was also ironic. A bunch of journalists having an off-the-record party?
I was grateful to have been allowed in with my charming date, Stranger publisher Tim Keck, and while I will respect the ban on relaying all that I experienced beyond the party-room doors, I don't think it's breaking any rules to say that the ban seemed, in the end, pretty unnecessary. I left feeling tipsy and warm (though, truth be told, due to some after-work Stranger staff cocktails I also arrived feeling tipsy and warm) and as I walked through the parking lot I wished that the final scene in the death of this civic institution hadn't been kept so private.
I will tell you this: While inside the party, a line from some article I'd read recently about the death of newspapers came into my head. I couldn't exactly remember the line then, which bugged me, and I was still trying to remember it as I walked across the parking lot after the party—which I believe means I can recount this without breaking the "no working press" rule, since my moment of attempted remembering, as well as my memory of not being able to remember inside the party, all happened, physically and metaphysically speaking, in the parking lot—and then when I woke up this morning I performed a quick search of the newspaper-killing Internet and within seconds found the line. It's from Michael Hirschorn's January article in The Atlantic about the possible death of The New York Times, the wider likelihood of a "collapse of daily print journalism," and what all of it will mean. It will mean many things, Hirschorn wrote, but among them:
It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind.
This is what the P-I party recalled for me: a premonition of the end of a semi-charmed way of middle-class life.
Illustration by Andrew Saeger.
quasi bohemian
smart
intellectuals??
lives of the mind??
Poor passive victims of technological fate and the stupidity of the masses......
come on, who're you talking about -- Joel Connelly? He's an intellectual??
You know, if they all hadn't done such a shitty job in informing, reporting, opining and commentating, they'd be in business today.
As to the reference to the cheapness of Hearst, Tim Keck, the bastard, is so fuckin' cheap, his news editor is reduced to stealing wine from QFC.
the mourning in daily, hourly detail.
@2 is right. Go do some real reporting.
Campaign consultant jumps ship, cries, can't betray old fried -- gotta be more there under the surface.
Donaldson, McGinn, Savage -- why's no one running if the mayor is really so low in the pols? The Underwood factor threatens them all?
The senate transportation committee -- why do seattle liberals whine when it doesn't favor them, when they don't bother to go sit on that committee?
Frank Chopp is now for the tunnel. Oh wait, that's if the state funding is capped so that little old Seattle bears the full cost of any overruns.
Gosh not much to report on is there?
And btw why does Vancouver get to build a 14 mile elevated train line in time for the Olympics when Seattle can't do jack shit and our 14 mile light rail line is taking what from 1997 to 2010 to build? 13 years? And five more to get to U district? 2016? Nineteen years to build from Seatac to Capitol hill, when Vancouver can conceptualize design and build its latest skytrain line in what, 8 years?
Go do some reporting.
As are the people above you.
What none of you seem to get is that it's the reporters at the P-I and elsewhere that created the content that news aggregators take advantage of. It's those same reporters that write articles that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert cite on their shows. Oh, wait, you think they do their own reporting?
"The Public" made a typical comment but it's one that isn't backed up by any actual factual information. The Seattle P-I, as with any newspaper, had a fantastic set of reporters there. They're only human. Like any business, they had their ups and downs.
Journalism is a totally fucking thankless job and it's any wonder that anyone does it in the first place. Why bother when they have to put up with shit faces like you?
No, they do it because they understand you're not the average person. You're, actually, a fuck face who shoul refrain from taking advantage of the content they produce. Go hide in your spider hole. Try not to read or watch news. You don't deserve it, after all.
And please, let us know what you do for a living so we can stereotype it and criticize your every move.
Pussies.
thinking grad school thoughts
writing grad school blogs
going to grad school-type bars
eating at grad school-type restaurants...
Intelligentsia= consumers of intellectual product.
As long as the intelligentsia exists, intellectuals will have jobs. There are fewer intellectual jobs right now, particularly in the media, because intelligentsia purchasing power is down. But intellectuals as an economic class will survive.
I thought your post was poignant and sad and completely on-point. Ignore @1&@2.
I've been thinking a lot about how if it can be revenue-ized (yay fake words) that blogging could potentially be a much more egalitarian and meritocratic version of this same public intellectual lifestyle, but that's a huge if, and even so, the death of traditional print is most certainly a tragic loss of publically-subsidized intellectualism at an individual level, regardless of how much the mainstream media's lack of commitment to hard journalism caused the death at a systematic level.
The goodbye-P-I party had one mean drunk, who still hasn't gotten over unsuccessful City Council race in which he was lampooned by The Stranger.
The educated middle class has for decades been encouraged to identify its interests with those of the wealthy holders of capital, and it is only now in this severe economic adjustment that many are beginning to realize that they have been duped, that earning a comfortable salary is still not the same as owning something, because the moment your job is gone the flow of money stops and you're in more or less the same boat as all those auto workers who got laid off twenty years ago.
The idea that they were a trust fun for "urban bohemians" while most Americans were moving to the suburbs shows how rarified these "journalists" had become. Journalists? To "journal" is to record. Yet, most articles in the Big Dailies do not record, they pontificate. The Big City News is a sermon delivered Daily to tell you how to think, who the bad guy is, and what you should buy today.
Goodbye, Command and Control media.
Hello, Freedom.
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