that thing you do

I posted a link to this Washington Post piece a few days back about their writer writing about Gawker taking his piece and blogging about it, which the WP writer felt was borderline stealing. I thought he overreacted then and well Gawker has fired back.

Newspaper style writing vs casual "blog" writing are two different beasts that should be able to co-exist. I'm not really familiar with the former, having only written one legit "newspaper journalism" piece (hopefully will get a few more under my belt), but I remember the day my piece ran, a HK mag writer gave me somewhat backhanded compliment. He told me:

"Pretty interesting read, it actually has more personality than the typical SCMP stuff".

My initial reaction to anyone dissing SCMP was "dude they the biggest English publication in HK, everyone reads them". But then yeah... it is pretty straight forward no frills writing as opposed to what he was doing at HK, which allowed him to drop the F bomb on Transformers 2 (I would have dropped all seven dirty words on the movie Transformers 2 if I had the chance).

I don't buy into the notion that real journalism must be the serious no nonsense no POV style, although one of the things we were always told was "newspapers don't tell you what to think, but what to think about".

But just as technology has forced musicians to change up their game and accept downloading, I think the old media has got to accept blogging too. Both sides have got to work together. A recap of a newspaper piece with a proper link should be fine.

Yeah I dunno. If i go any further I'm gonna get back to how rad Bill Simmons is because he combines the best of both worlds. So I'll stop the Simmons lovefest and watch That Thing You Do Now (Liv Tyler is so good in this)