July 7th, 2006 → 4:43 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Apparently, this post from Wednesday hurt Jon Friedman’s feelings; it only took him two days to come back with a response, slugged “Columnists are people, too.” Here’s the money quote:
“I contend that too many bloggers hurt themselves. They come across as loudmouths looking for an argument or a way to exploit the relative celebrity of their subjects. It’s kind of pathetic when writers can’t find something original to say and have to resort to criticizing someone else just to be heard.”
There’s so much to say about these three sentences it’s hard to know where to start. (Relative celebrity? Really? And isn’t trenchant criticism better than public fawning?) So instead I’ll just point out two tiny, completely inconsequential errors in the following section:
“I was recently blasted by several bloggers who objected to my topics, angles and conclusions (Have I left anything out, folks? If so, I’m sure you’ll let me know ASAP).
A reader responded to one blog: ‘Wow — I had no idea so many people felt so strongly about Jon Friedman. Kind of makes me feel bad for the guy.’ Thank you for that, but no worries.”
1. Actually, yes, you did leave some stuff out: I was critiquing the absence of any actual reporting and the number of glaring errors in your piece about Time.
2. That quote? About kind of feeling bad? That wasn’t a reader…that was me. Here are some clues: it says “By Seth Mnookin” and the only place it appears is on my website.
Take the weekend off and get some rest. Really: it’s kind of pathetic when writers can’t find something factual to say and have to resort to making mistakes just to be heard.
EDIT: A friend (and former editor) points out a much more on-point criticism about blogging: “the problem with blogging is it’s like the village voice letters section of old–the back-and-forth goes on long after anyone other than the two participants could possibly give a shit.” Sigh. As usual, he’s right. I’m done. (And please, Jon, don’t try to tempt me back by writing about how Fortune should really consider publishing every other week.)
Post Categories: CBS Marketwatch & Jon Friedman & Media reporting
July 7th, 2006 → 9:46 am @ Seth Mnookin
Being a baseball junkie can be a full time job. There’s your standard 5 or 6 nights a week of games, a daily dose of Baseball Tonight, your team of choice’s fan site, and the next day’s papers.
There’s also Buster Olney, who puts together a daily blog aggregating news from virtually every local paper around the country. Olney’s blog is an amazing thing: by 9 or 10 in the morning, he’s generally managed to read a couple of dozen stories, figure out what the most interesting nugget or two is, and tie it all together in a pithy, informative package. I get tired just reading through it all; I have no idea how he manages to do that and find the energy to appear on TV. Didn’t they ban greenies this year?
Post Categories: Buster Olney & ESPN
July 6th, 2006 → 10:24 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Two nice moments in the NESN broadcast of tonight’s Sox-Devil Rays game.
* In the first inning, after Manny cranked a ball into the left-field stands for a two-run shot, Jerry Remy got audibly excited. But instead of just screaming, “DEEP DRIVE, HOME RUN!” (or something inane like “that two-run shot is as good as a grand slam“), Remy’s excitement stemmed from Manny’s freakish balance on a Scott Shields change-up. Two batters earlier, Shields had struck out Mark Loretta with a change; not only did Manny take note, but Remy did too. Manny’s ability to correctly forecast the offspeed offering and sit on it is impressive; just as impressive–especially in comparison to the vast majority of broadcasters working today–is that Remy, instead of simply marveling at Manny’s power or skill or whatever, used the moment to point out how smart a player Manny is and what his at-bat illustrated.
* In the top of the ninth, with Alex Gonzalez on third, nobody out, and Kevin Youkilis at bat, Youk hit a fastball sharply between first and second. It was a hit and run–Gonzalez was off with the pitch–and Devil Rays second baseman Jorge Cantu had broken towards the bag; as a result, he had to scramble to his left, turning a potential double-play ball into a bases loaded situation. Before the play was over, Remy was explaining how Cantu should have been in position to make the play; it’s the shortstop that usually covers second when there’s a hit-and-run on with the pitcher throwing a fastball to a right-handed hitter. And unlike the rote “how many times does a guy make a great defensive play to end an inning and then lead off the next inning with a big hit?” (answer: almost exactly as much as you’d expect), Remy’s observation explained what turned out to be a game deciding play: after a Mark Loretta walk loaded the bases, David Ortiz hit a grand slam for his second home run of the game. The Boston Red Sox: fun to watch and educational.
P.S. After 83 games, David Ortiz has 29 home runs and 82 RBIs. His projected totals for the season? Fifty seven home runs and 160 RBIs. He is a god among men.
Post Categories: Baseball & Broadcasting & David Ortiz & Jerry Remy & NESN
July 6th, 2006 → 8:18 am @ Seth Mnookin
This is the sixth in a series of outtakes from interviews done for Feeding the Monster, to be published on July 11 by Simon & Schuster. It is the last of three outtakes from this interview with Nomar Garciaparra, which was conducted in Austin, Texas on October 28, 2005.
On the rumors about his Achilles injury: When I heard how I got hurt playing soccer, it was insulting to me because it attacked my integrity. And some of the other stuff I have heard was insulting to my integrity. The stories that I heard that I was like, ‘What?’ When I heard that one, ‘You got hurt playing soccer,’ I actually heard that one after I was traded and the funny thing was that was the year, that year and the year before I didn’t kick the soccer ball around. I was like, ‘Why would you bring up soccer, because of my wife? Now is it getting personal? Why that?’ It’s just so far from the truth. I played the first two/three games of spring training, and what really happened with my Achilles and everything, when I got hurt—I assume a lot of responsibility for this because I was vague, and I’m not going to deny that—but I got hit there, and no one saw it, I was taking a ground ball. It didn’t bother me till three or four days later. I could have been other stuff. All I know is it flared up. This is how it happened. I’m not going to lie. Did that really cause it, maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. So I asked the doctor, ‘Can this happen?’ Because it didn’t flare up or bother me until later. And the doctor was like, ‘It can.’ When you’ve got a thousand people asking you what happened to you, ‘Well it could be this. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.’ I don’t know what to tell them.
Like I said, [the confusion surrounding the injury] is my fault as well. I’m not saying that I didn’t make mistakes along the way. I’m not here to tell you I didn’t. But either way, it flared up and it flared up really bad. It was so painful, so swollen, it was so bad, I couldn’t walk. I was in a boot. I was stubborn. I didn’t want crutches. And that is what I dealt with that year. It sucked. What I did learn about the injury, if you know anything about tendonitis at all, it’s inflammation of the tendon and the tendon is throbbing. It’s hurting. It’s painful, and it can gets so swollen it can eventually pop. You really have to calm that down for a few reasons: one for reduced pain, two to strengthen the area. If it gets weak, it’s just going to give. And the thing about the Achilles is, there is not much blood flow in that area of the body and the only way to get the inflammation out is with blood. Not much I could do in that area so it took me a while to come back and for it to calm down, to deal with that so it wouldn’t snap because if it snaps you’re done. And I’m also thinking about my free agent year, you know, ‘It doesn’t look like they’ll want me back.’ What was I going to do?
On the 2004 season: Throughout the year, that is another thing that hurt me was hearing that I was faking it, faking the injury. Those are the things that I don’t understand exactly. And in my free agent year….I’m not sticking it to the Red Sox, I’m not sticking it to anybody, my teammates, my fans, myself, those are the people I care about the most, I’m not sticking it to them. I mean the stuff you hear. I wouldn’t do this in the free agent year. If I could play, I could play. So when I was finally able to comeback, I played.
On the Red Sox’s World Series win: I was happy, elated, excited. It was a little bit hard, sure. Absolutely. I wanted to be there with them. But they made me feel like I was with them. Guys on the team called me throughout it. Trot, Tek, JD, ‘Hey guys, you’re winning, keep going.’ They’d call and say, ‘Nommie, did you see that?’ I didn’t watch the World Series but I heard…I didn’t sit there and watch it. But I followed it and I followed them, Trot, all the boys.
I was happy for the city, I was happy for those people. The whole time I was there, I said I wanted them to win a World Series. I was part of that championship season. For forty of them, I was a part about that. And my teammates knew that. It was great. Getting the call from them, and then me calling them back, it meant the world to me. I hope I just gave you the facts. I’m not here to bash anyone. I’m not one to say this guy’s this way. This is the first time I have said how it really happened. You can see through the media the half-truths. That’s why I’m here now. Because you hear it, I’m not one to point the finger. I don’t know how someone interprets it. They said they do respect me and that’s all I ask. And all I have ever given the media is that respect in return. And it may not have been easy maybe difficult, but at the very least I hope I was respectful at all times.
Post Categories: Feeding the Monster Outtakes & Nomar Garciaparra & Red Sox
July 6th, 2006 → 8:16 am @ Seth Mnookin
Wow — I had no idea so many people felt so strongly about Jon Friedman. Kind of makes me feel bad for the guy.
Anyway, as I know as well as anyone, there’s no shortage of subjects for those looking to engage in critical media analysis (although as someone who spent several months poring through newspaper reports from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, I can say unequivocally that the level of reporting and writing is far better today than it has ever been…but I digress). But I’m not one of those curmudgeons determined to search out what’s wrong with the world.
This article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic reminded me of how thrilling long-form journalism can be. It’s partly a history of the Monster of Florence, a serial killer who roamed the Italian hillsides from 1968 until 1985, and partly a narrative about crime novelist Douglas Preston’s involvement in the case. The full article is only available online for Atlantic subscribers, but the magazine’s website does feature an interview with Preston. I’ve always been a true-crime junkie, and Preston’s tale–like Blake Eskin’s Granta piece about Benjamin Wilkormirski or James Ellroy‘s and Steve Hodel‘s works on the Black Dahlia–belongs in my favorite subset of the genre: a story that combines a chilling tale with personal history. It’s well worth picking up a copy of the magazine to check this out.
(An aside: has any book title been more ripped off than Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer? Try doing a Google search: you need to wade through a lot of other pieces that have appropriated the name of Malcolm’s classic…which remains, sixteen years after it was printed, one of the definitive texts about the conflicts and quandaries of practicing journalism.)
(Another aside: with five days until the release of Feeding the Monster, it’s likely my posting will slow down a bit as I nurture my anxiety, er, prepare for my book tour. I know that promise might seem a little empty, but this time I’m serious. I think. I do have some more outtakes and sneak peeks fired up and ready to go. Oh, and also, there’s only four more days to enter the Monster Sweepstakes.)
Post Categories: Jon Friedman & Journalist and the Murderer & The Atlantic
July 5th, 2006 → 9:21 am @ Seth Mnookin
For about six years, I’ve been mystified by the work of Jon Friedman. He writes a media column for CBS MarketWatch.com, a financial news site bought by Dow Jones a couple of years ago. Oftentimes, Friedman’s work seems to consist of glowing profiles of this or that media exec. Other times, Friedman seems to do nothing except parrot whatever it is that’s just been said. As the Columbia Journalism Review‘s website noted recently in an article titled “The Man Who Knew Too Little and Wrote Too Much,” “Friedman occupies the odd cultural space of both upholding conventional wisdom while struggling mightily to understand it himself….As with so much else, Friedman doesn’t necessarily get anything wrong, but by time he wraps things up it’s clear he hasn’t gotten anything accomplished, either.”
Which isn’t to say Friedman isn’t occasionally impressive: Every now and then, he comes up with something that’s both banal and boneheaded. Take today’s column, titled “How Time magazine can stand apart: For starters it can change its publication date.” (Now there’s a thrilling headline.) Friedman proposes Time close mid-week, enabling it to hit newsstands on Thursdays. As Friedman asks, “Does it really make a lot of sense for the final two/sevenths of a newsmagazine’s cycle to encompass Saturday and Sunday, when little of consequence happens?”
Now, various execs at Time Inc. have advocated moving Time‘s publication to mid-week for a while; hell, I know that and I haven’t done regular media reporting since 2003. Friedman, in the midst of “propos[ing]…something truly revolutionary” apparently hasn’t done the reporting to uncover what I’ve picked up in idle chatter. (The reasons for such a move wouldn’t be the two that Friedman suggests–to improve morale and encompass more of the weekly news cycle–but because there’s a good case to be made that these days, people are more likely to have time to read a newsweekly on the weekend.) What’s more, Time, like Newsweek, closes on Saturday, not Sunday; the only way it can get news that breaks on Sunday into the magazine is to rip up an issue that’s already at the printers. (Friedman uses the capture of Saddam Hussein, which occured on a Sunday, as the rare example of news which broke on the weekend. It took me about 90 seconds to find a Times article about Saddam’s capture that contains the following sentence: “The breaking news was of such magnitude that both Time and Newsweek decided to redo issues that were already being printed.”)
That’s not the only groundbreaking suggestion Friedman has; he also recommends that Time put up exclusive web content. “The American media are missing a good bet to attract greater numbers of readers” by “provid[ing] exclusive content geared only to online readers,” he says. What an awesome idea! You mean like having Joe Klein write web-only columns? Or hiring Ana Marie Cox to do the same thing? Or maybe putting Andrew Sullivan’s blog online?
Oh, wait: time.com already does all of that. To be fair, all of those columns are buried on the upper right-hand side of the magazine’s homepage.
Post Categories: CBS Marketwatch.com & Jon Friedman & Media reporting & Time Magazine
July 4th, 2006 → 11:51 pm @ Seth Mnookin
This the fifth in a series of outtakes from interviews done for Feeding the Monster, to be published on July 11 by Simon & Schuster. This interview with Curt Schilling was conducted in the Red Sox dugout on September 28, 2005. Read the book for exclusive details on how Schilling ended up having emergency surgery in October 2004, his reaction to his 2005 season, and Pedro Martinez’s response to Schilling’s arrival in Boston.
On whether he thought he’d end up in Boston: I went into [the 2003 offseason] thinking and feeling like I was a free agent with a contract, which gave me a lot of leverage, because we were both extremely happy in Arizona. But I had known for an extended period of time that that was my final season in Arizona, just based on the contractual situation and things that had been said by [Diamondbacks owner] Mr. [Jerry] Colangelo and the front office there. I knew I was probably going to be the odd man out, and when we started to think about what we were going to do, that season I was injured for a lot of the year on and off, so we started to look around, and the two things we wanted weren’t exclusive.
We wanted to go somewhere that we were familiar with and comfortable with, and we wanted to be on a contending ballclub for the remaining years of my career. I went into this knowing that this was going to be the last contract for me. The two teams that kind of jumped out at us were the Phillies and the Yankees. It became obvious very early on that the Phillies were not interested on a personal level, that that wasn’t going to work out. Because through back channels, I made it very clear to them that I’d go there for a lot less than I actually ended up signing for, for a lot shorter period of time. We wanted to go back to what we thought was home. I think there were a lot of personal issues between people that were in the organizations and myself that just weren’t going to work out.
And then with the Yankees situation, we let it be known that that was one of the teams we were interested in. Boston wasn’t a team that we were even contemplating, because I didn’t know anything about them. I didn’t know anything the organization, I didn’t know anything about the people here.
On Fenway’s reputation as being a bad park for fly-ball pitchers: Well, that wasn’t even a top-of-the-rung factor. That was something that just added to the negatives. I’d played here and knew it was an incredible atmosphere to pitch in, but it was not something that offered a lot for me.
On why he decided to consider Boston: When Tito [Francona] ended up getting interviewed for this job, it became someplace that I was interested in. It all happened, literally, in a span of about 12 hours. My wife had a fundraiser at our house, and Mr. Colangelo and [general manager Joe] Mr. Garagiola were both there, and this was, I think, the day I’d heard that Tito had been interviewed for the job. And I felt like if Tito interviewed for a job, he was going to get it. And I went to Joe and I told Joe that I would probably contemplate or consider coming to Boston. I know that within five minutes, he told Jerry, and within five minutes after that, Jerry came to me and told me he might have a deal. My impression was that Boston had talked to Arizona and had a preliminary deal on the table in case they became a team I was interested in, and when that happened it happened very quickly.
On the experience of pitching in Fenway: First of all, I was prepared, to a degree, for what this was like, but I wasn’t prepared for what it really was. The first thing that I kind of, that took me not by surprise, but was more than I expected was the level of the personal relationship that these fans have with the players. If you are a member of this franchise, you’re a member of their families. There was so much hype and excitement, and I was excited to think that coming here could have that kind of effect on people. I think in the end, coming here, the final piece of the puzzle was that Boston presented me, on a personal level, was a challenge that no place else can offer. Philly had won [the World Series]. In New York you were supposed to win. Boston had never won [since 1918], and to come here and be a part of something that could change that was incredibly attractive to me. From day one, it was nice. It was everything I had hoped it would be, atmosphere-wise and more.
On what’s changed for the Red Sox after winning the World Series: You can take the same 25 guys from one year to the next, and things are going to change. The atmosphere is going to change, because people change. Everything changes: the dynamics in the clubhouse. We all have families. We all live real lives. Teammates go through divorces, teammates get married, teammates have kids—those are life-changing experiences, and people change because of them. So regardless of whether you’ve turned over a whole roster or have 25 of the same guys, the dynamics are going to be totally different each year. The difference here is that there’s so much scrutiny, so much media, that every change is addressed and dissected to the umpteenth degree. It’s monotonous, and things are made out to be a much bigger deal here outside the clubhouse than they are inside the clubhouse.
On the press coverage in Philadelphia compared to the coverage in Boston: One of the differences is that in Philadelphia, the media is so negative. It is such a negative place. There are some negative people here, but the years I spent in Philly, there was such a deep resentment for the front office and the team that fans were not going to support the team just to show the ownership and the team a thing or two. That’s not the case here.
Post Categories: Curt Schilling & Feeding the Monster Outtakes & Red Sox
