As a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist, Dave Horsey has every reason to feel good about himself, and he does. On his Hearst-sponsored Web site, he looks as if he’s channeling John Wayne.
At a party for the new PI, Horsey welcomed the assembled “to the revolution.”
It’s no secret that the media world is being turned upside-down, and as in any revolution there is some pain and discomfort in all the changes. But there are also incredible opportunities. Something new is being born, and I think we’re giving birth to it right here.
He was referring to the online-only PI. How can a shadow of the old be a model for the new?
Unlike more than 80 percent of his former colleagues (including me), Horsey wasn’t shown the door. And unlike the few who remain (except freelance), he did not have to give up his severance to remain employed (like Eric Nalder, directly by the Hearst Corporation). Nor did Horsey have to accept a big pay cut or lose other benefits.
Makes sense that he was favored. Hearst would be crazy to let him go, as he is the best editorial cartoonist working in what used to be called mainstream media. On the other hand, did he have to go that far in praising the ghost of a newspaper? Something new is being born with a shallow, once-over-lightly approach? Not only new, but revolutionary?
Thank God Hearst got rid of the dead weight, right, Dave? The people who insisted on asking pesky questions. Who needs them? The new PI can rewrite a press release and post that puppy before it has time to pee on the carpet.
On Wednesday Horsey aimed another kick at the departed.
Close to a dozen former PI staff members now have blogs and are trying to make a go of it online. (Best source here.) In that context, how are they to feel about today’s cartoon?
The online-only PI may be making money. But considering the talent on board, it’s a terrible product. The Stranger
employs roughly the same number of people working on the editorial side, yet The Stranger is a (sometimes dubious) pleasure, while the new PI is the dead spot on a basketball floor where the ball
won’t bounce. I would feel disgraced by my long association, except the
new version is nothing like what died on March 17. The former PI had
highs and lows; the new has mostly lows in a creepy flash package.
Horsey’s
point about blogging was good five years ago when Stephen Colbert made
it, but today there are many blogs with traffic that exceeds the PI’s
and many, many with quality that does.
Journalism is about
truth to power, not about being swell to Hearst. At
the very least, Horsey should preserve some dignity. It’s ok to take
the money, but he doesn’t have to kiss the customer on the lips.
(Can’t find the original Colbert bloggers-are-idiots piece, but this one’s pretty good about social networking.)
Regina, I still love you, even though your comments about me are preposterous.
In no way was I deriding my former colleagues in my remarks about the new media reality. We are, indeed, in the midst of a revolution in the world of journalism. There are some terrible results — most particularly, the thousands of jobs lost by incredibly talented journalists such as my friends and colleagues at the P-I. But there are also new opportunities for us all as we try to reinvent the way news is delivered to the public. My remarks were addressed to the advertisers who are vital to making new models work. If there’s no money stream, there won’t be any journalists being paid and we won’t be able to rebuild American journalism. My greatest hope is that the business model of seattlepi.com will be so successful that many of the reporters who lost their jobs will be hired back and the great tradition of the P-I will be reborn.
As far as my cartoon about blogging, Regina, you were way, way off the mark. The cartoon was inspired by a New York Times article that said 95 percent of the blogs that have been started are now dormant and all but a fraction of those that remain active have an audience of one. The point of the cartoon was that, just because a person has an opinion, there is no guarantee that anyone else wants to hear it. Most people still want to read the words of those who have credentials. I, for instance, would prefer to read Regina Hackett’s opinion about art rather than the comments of someone who is merely popping off an ill-informed screed.
Regina, I’m sorry you decided to pop off about me without doing a little research, but, as I said, I still love you and all my P-I colleagues.
I know I’m one of the few lucky ones in this current sad situation, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the old P-I and the people who made it great.
David Horsey
Horsey’s cartoon reminds me of Emily White’s unintentional humor piece for City Arts a few months back:
This paragraph gives me the most amusing mental image. It involves Emily White on an Away Team from an old Star Trek episode. Where are we, Captain? Planet Blogosphere! What kind of read do you get from the atmosphere? Nothing at all. It’s almost like something is sucking the soul out of it. What’s that behind you? OH MY GOD IT’S LINDSAY LOHAN’S MYSPACE PAGE! AAAAHHHH!
Blogs are a medium, not a writing style. Naturally, they will only be as thoughtful as the folks writing them. (The same thing can be said of glossy free magazines.)
Emily. Yes! A blog is a medium, as thoughtful as the person responsible for it. Thinking is not Emily White’s strong point. She’s bad on A to B and back again, but she’s great at engaging incoherence.
Thanks for all your support. I’d talk more but I have two kids to support and a mortgage to pay. And to think that I could have neither if I only remained noble and unemployed.
That’s it? Your defense is no defense because you’re a working stiff? Remember why we got into journalism in the first place. It was not to take orders and shut up about it. You are one of the best reporter/ prose stylists ever at the PI. You disappeared yourself into management long ago, presumably for working-stiff reasons, and now, the salary is reason enough to turn your work into a blank slate? I see what you’re writing at the online ghost of the PI. Where did the style go and the determination to get all of whatever story you’re on?
Regina,
You and I had some great light-night conversations at the P-I. I miss those interactions.
This morning I had a flash back memory of the weekend after we found out the P-I would close. I was in my fourth crying episode. At this particular time, I let it wail in the shower and collapsed to the floor. It f*cking hurt.
We ALL mourned the closure of the printed paper. Nobody at seattlepi.com wants to step on our laid off friends and colleagues. Perceived insults are not intentional.
There is a revolution. And it is happening at seattlepi.com. And you know what? It’s happening here on your blog too. Big media is breaking up into smaller blocks. You’re part of it.
Horsey wasn’t insulting anyone — in fact, his speech opened with a tribute to what was lost. He honored the loss, and then moved on.
Suffer me a brief analogy, that is slightly scientific, though I’m taking liberties:
Dinosaurs evolved into birds. Big, great mighty beasts with loud roars and big chomps. Nobody messed with the T-Rex.
Today’s sparrow couldn’t have existed without the mighty tyrannosaurus. It owes its very existence to things that came before it.
But does that make the sparrow a ghost of the t-rex? A shadow?
No, it’s just different. It’s evolved from its former self. Smaller. Special in its own right, but not a shell of a creature, and not pretending to be anything else.
What good would a sparrow be if it spent its entire life mourning its old self? It still must do its best to live and fly.
The same is true of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattlepi.com.
I know there are holes in this analogy. Please don’t tell me to go eat worms.
Hi Andrea! I agree that birds gotta fly and fish gotta swim, and so does Ella Fitzgerald. But the online PI IS a shadow of the old. How could it be anything else? It launched in the shell of the old design and takes up a fraction of that space. Good reporters work there (such as yourself, whom I was happy to see featured recently), but the shell those excellent writers can’t fill muffles what they do.
Point 2: No arts coverage. What happened to Seattle first? Plus, the arts links to other sites tend to reflect a lack of consciousness. Who’s picking them? I visualize a bot. Why links to brain-dead reviews at film.com, when links to intelligent ones are just as easy? I’m deeply disappointed in no arts coverage. Josh shoots gorgeous photos of Pacific Northwest Ballet, but there’s no writing about it. Why not link to reviews elsewhere? The online PI does not need the real PI’s arts staff. Nobody from that staff is essential. But it needs new people who can find a pulse and set a fresh agenda for writing about art in the Northwest. This is not the impossible dream.
What Dave said about the revolution and his cartoon about bloggers hit me the wrong way. Unlike you (and me), he’s completely covered. Good for him. He deserves it, but so do you, and you’re working on the fly. I at least got severance. You got a pay cut, no severance and the usual press handicap of working in a top-down organization. The online PI appears to be a click whore. I’d care less if it weren’t called the PI, and if my peers weren’t employed there, twisting in the wind.
It can change, but I don’t see the will to change or the vision. Move this shadow, and I’ll be delighted. Fondly, Regina
Regina,
You are really something. It’s too bad someone who so enjoys attacking people arbitrarily has been given a position as a critic — your proper destiny would be wrestler or some kind of ambush artist/spammer. This I say after 8 months of sitting two feet away you at the dead P-I, and you telling me how BRILLIANT I am, pretty much every day, like a stewardess or something. And then attacking me so regularly in your shadow blog world it’s like some kind of cycle I do not care to figure out.
If you decide to leave Seattle, we would all be the better for it. Fingers crossed you will go back East, where you belong. Among the established generations of sharks and backstabbers.
Emily White
Hi Emily. I think you’re brilliantly intuitive. But your interventions in the logical flow of copy kept me up nights. Which you know. Daily newspapers can be lead-footed, obvious and repetitive. Your lack of those qualities was charming, but in the end, not enough. You’re the only editor I ever had who functioned with more sky than earth. Thanks to you, I developed a real fear of editors flying.
it’s not called “flying” it’s called “being edited.”
I’ll keep a copy of the previous incarnation of your answer, and paste it in next time you attack me, if I am bothering to read. Which I very much hope I am not. I would rather be reading US.
ew
Emily. My tact is invisible to you. You’re not good at the thing that actually occurred, otherwise known as a fact. Everyone on the arts staff thought so, including those who are fond of you and including those who have severe cases of grudge deficit disorder.
To readers of Bouncing Ball:
I’m going to slip this comment in weeks after the original posting in the hopes that only readers but not Regina Hackett see this posting.
First, I sat next to Regina Hackett back at the old P-I on Wall Street (where the Glob spun for a reason) and not once did she say she found me brilliant. So that sets me apart from Emily White. Regina never even called me semi-smart.
Second, Dave Horsey’s tactic of telling a critic that he loves her is the first thing he learned on the Daily, back when he and other Dolly Parton-style big hairs were chasing Charles Odegaard trying to slip out the back door of the Administration Building at the University of Washington. In fact, Horsey yelled “I love you” to Odegaard in a shameless effort to get an exclusive. It worked. Odegaard stopped and thus Horsey gained his first Pulitzer.
As for Horsey saying he loves Regina Hackett, I can only say, get in line, pal. I loved sitting near Hackett so much that when I turned coat and went to the Seattle Times, I graciously allowed Regina to have my old phone number, 448-8332. (That number now rings into a dictation machine that transcribes comments into a blog called 8332.) Later, I tried to get Dave to join me at the Times but he had an understandable concern about the chilly water that flowed in the veins of the editorial-page editor of that era.
Finally, if Arts Journal decides to throw a fancy party for its advertisers, I’m quite willing to give the speech and celebrate the shock of the new, or the new new thing, or the value of hits or eye balls, or whatever puts digital journalism on the cutting edge of cutting costs as the mass medium turns mini, along with the pay checks.
Have tux, will travel.
Casey Corr
P.S. If by chance, this posting is a duplicate, I apologize. I got an error message when I tried to post the first version and lost my draft. The blogging world has its cruelties.
Regina: I am so excited to read your Objective Reporting on What People Thought of Me. It’s a real thrill! I think I will go read my US magazine now.
Over and out, I will leave the reading of this blog to someone who has the stomach for it. And btw if you lost the “I” for a few months, you might really do yourself (I-self?) a big old favor.
ew
Yow. As someone not in the thick of the PI – online, ghostly, reincarnated or otherwise – I can make a few observations.
David Horsey’s cartoon, as well as his general understanding of the medium of blogging, is so off-the-mark I’m embarrassed for him.
The story of the PI is a sad one. It is a death, and there is certainly a loss in its passing. The PI online is now one news site among thousands, and doesn’t stand much of chance of competing. (I much prefer the NY Times online.) It is very sad that so many people have lost their jobs and were not well cared for upon departure. Livelihoods have been dismantled.
Regina’s livelihood in writing isn’t going down with the PI *because* she is so involved in the local blogging community. Her former colleagues should take note. Also, her candid willingness to call it like it is is valuable.
Is this the new Tornado Board?
Hi Casey. Yes! (For the non-PI, the Tornado Board was an internal site on which staff battled out their various responses to what appeared or failed to appear in the paper.)
I rise again to comment on significant matters.
Casey McNerthney, you picked the right first name right but it’s down hill from there.
It was not the Tornado Board.
It was called the Bitch Board, a place where P-I staffers vented towards management in ways so creative or just plain vile that management stopped by to read the best writing that went unpublished.
One P-I scribe made a habit of stealing management stationary and using it to post subversive comments. Upon my own departure, I used the Managing Editor’s stationary to praise me as a long time secret confidante on the day of my departure to the Seattle Times.
Just for fun. Regina, would you please let Emily White edit my post?
Why does Susanna Bluhm think I’m an idiot for merely pointing out that 95 percent of the blogs ever created have gone dormant and suggesting, therefore, that, for most people, blogging one’s way to a steady income is a bit of an illusion. Why should I be embarrassed about stating something so obvious about the natural order of things on the internet? It is a Darwinian world online and only the fittest survive.
Dave. I don’t think Darwin applies as you’re applying him. The bigger and more important issue for arts bloggers is not, who’s the toughest, but who can help create community? Arts bloggers succeed by joining together and creating exchanges with other writers as well as artists, critics, curators, collectors and anybody who cares about art. If a blog is where people go to get and give information as well as feel welcome, that’s a successful blog. It’s not about top dog, it’s about the pack. Collectivism, not individualism. Dialogue and links, not monologue.
Susanna doesn’t think you’re an idiot, but she does think you don’t understand the new model of what works in the new age, rapidly replacing the old.
Your job is safe if anybody’s journalism job is safe. Nobody’s job is safe.
Hi Casey. I don’t think the former PI arts editor in question wants to play. Comments are like tennis, except with words. She does not store her racket in this gym.
I remember that Cartoon ya wrote David. Hopefully this blog right here isn’t an example of what you were bringing up there.
Much respect