Reporters may have a valid claim on our pity as well as our scorn

Blogging in general has a kind of therapeutic value and as much as I enjoy the ability to unload whatever baggage that I have been traveling with but I have often longed for the housekeeping value that editors provide for print journalists. Someone else to take on the grunge work and check my facts, clean up the grammar, check the spelling, and delete words or sentences for clarity or whatever might be construed as a libelous intent. I often write 10 to 12 posts a day and only a small fraction actually makes it into The Last Amazon.

I have huge unfinished pieces on a variety of topics stored on my hard drive – all unfinished for a variety of reasons. What I have written on Lebanon alone has the makings of at least a 600 page book. A great deal of what I write sees the light of day at 4am in a very pre-caffeinated state, and take this on faith, but when I take a look at it after the medicinal value of caffeine kicks-in gets consigned to dead storage on the hard drive to await a very uncertain fate.

Sometimes I can’t find the original source and then the premise of the whole post falls apart without it. Sometimes I do find the original source and discover my memory of the facts doesn’t jive with the source. Or I just plain lose interest in continuing the piece because it is far too long and is much more worthy of a thesis topic than a blog post. Or it’s because it is far too personal to commit to the blogsphere, and sometimes during the process I just get too damned bored to go on. Now money is a great motivator for me and if I was paid to produce and had a deadline; I would flog away to pick up the lucre at the end but a blogger doesn’t have that luxury.

Often what I have written is the result of what I call the twit factor of print journalists. Never having been a journalism major I assumed that an editor only has license to apply a housekeeping function to a writer’s finished product. Editing or deleting sentences for clarity, checking spelling, grammar, facts, sources, or in other words, all the grunge work that bores me silly. I never imagined that an editor would inject prose to modify a point a writer never made.

I can’t imagine having to go through life at family events, parties or public functions and having to constantly justify or clarify what I didn’t write because some little pissant of an editor used his license to flesh out what I either didn’t write or didn’t mean. I remain unconvinced even for money that there is a value of being publicly misunderstood but feel free to put forth a compelling argument otherwise. I’m open.

I have been thinking hard of the Potter/Peanut affair and it makes me the question the validity of what I have written in the past criticizing what I assumed was Potter’s work only because his name was on the banner over the story. I stand by the points I made but how much of whatever we see in print is actually what reporters have in fact written? For some journalists, it is easy to determine how much of twit they really are because their personas have a public dimension (think Robert Fisk) but without the medium of broadcasting; how can we ever really tell without a footnote from the editor at the bottom of a piece noting changes both large and small?

All of which makes me conclude that blogging (for me) is a much more preferable medium than journalism for communicating a point of view or ultimately changing the nature of ideas. It may not be financially rewarding and the audience is far, far smaller but at least the words are all mine – warts and all.