Paxety Pages

My first reason is rather personal.  It would be four more months before my father was liberated by Patton's tanks.  He had been a gunner aboard a B-24 bomber that was shot down over France in 1943.  He was turned over to the Germans by French farmers - so much for the idea that the French were fighting along with us.  He spent the remainder of the war in a rather famous place - Stalag 17B.  You can read about the brave men who suffered so greatly there in a new book by Randall Rasmussen.

My second reason was the concept of the blogburst. A blogburst, according to Israpundit is a simultaneous, co-ordinated posting by a large group of webmasters and bloggers on a given topic. It just reminds me too much of pack journalism.

What's that? You see it every day on the local and national news.  Everyone has the same stories. Why? Laziness and the desire to fit in with a peer group. Organizations, companies and PR firms frequently fax news releases to newsrooms.  It's far easier for an assignment editor to hand one of the faxes to a reporter as a story idea than to think up something original.  Sometimes a story becomes "the" story to do, and it becomes a continuing, night after night story.  The reporters, being human, tend to group together and talk about their stories.  If one happens to have an idea, they all run with it. Here's an example.

During the OJ trial, I was working for a Fox TV affiliate producing a 10PM (eastern) newscast.  There was no Fox News Channel at the time, so news feeds from Fox were problematic.  The network had no news staff, it relied on reporters from individual stations to provide stories.  Eric Shawn, a fine reporter, was sent to Los Angeles to report on the trial.  He actually worked for the Fox O&O in New York, WNYW-TV.  He would feed out his stories to the Fox stations around the country by satellite

But because Fox had no real news staff, the stories were usually fed only about 5-minutes before the news aired on the east coast.   That would not be a problem, except that Fox had not made any provisions to feed a script earlier - meaning we, in the local stations, had no idea what Eric would write about. Why was that a problem? Because our local anchors had to have a script to lead into the package - news jargon for a script to introduce the taped piece. And yes, anchors read scripts written by other people.  They don't make it up on the air.

I used my knowledge of pack journalism to solve the script problem.  At 9PM eastern time, Geraldo had a show on CNBC.  He always lead with a John Gibson report from the OJ trial (interestingly, both of them are on Fox now.) I would watch Gibson's live story, then write the script for our anchors.  I knew that whatever element of the trial John Gibson reported on, Eric Shawn would report, too. It never failed.

Mickey Kaus writes about a similar thing at CNN and in the blogosphere.  He calls is his theory of topic-A'ism and applies it to CNN head Jon Klein's plan to use the network to tell, in Klein's words, stories that are relevant to your life told through the eyes of a compelling, central character. When I was doing local news, we called that kind of storytelling "personalizing the story." Here's Kaus:

There is a logic to Klein's alleged plan--the logic of Topic A-ism. According to this theory, people want to read about whatever is the hottest story right now, and they want to read a lot of it--they want to wallow in it, get everybody's "take" on it, stay with it and live it until the story's next twist. Topic-Aism has long been a depressing reality of the Web. Traffic flows to whatever site has something up on the JFK Jr. crash, or the last debate, or the election returns, or whatever's hot. If all you cared about was traffic you'd always write about Topic A. And there is always, by definition, a topic A, just as there is always a #1 on Blogdex. ... Klein apparently wants to transport this Web logic to television. If CNN is good on crisis days and falters on normal days, then make every day a crisis day! Focus on the One Big Story and milk it for all it's worth! Simple. CNN could change its mascot to a hedgehog. ... The obvious problems: Sometimes there isn't only one Big Story ... Sometimes the One Big Story lasts only a few hours, time enough for the Web to react but not necessarily for cable TV to react... Sometimes the One Big Story isn't very big. .. Sometimes the One Big Story doesn't have a "compelling central character." ....P.S.: I hate Topic-Aism, in part because it means people expect me to post something on the big story of the day even when I have nothing interesting to say about the big story of the day. ... Plus the "other things going on in the world" are the Topic As of tomorrow. ... Plus the pickin's are easier on Topics B-Z. ... Plus I get really sick of Topic A.

I get sick of Topic A, also. What's there to say about Auschwitz. It was horrible.  Maybe with the holocaust deniers and the anti-Semitism sweeping Europe, we need to be reminded. I just didn't feel like participating in a blogburst.  Besides, I'm worried about Cuba and Venezuela.

I think my anti-Topic A'ism is one reason I so miss Stephen Den Beste.  He wrote about whatever interested him - sometimes science, sometimes politics, sometimes the big story of the day.