Beer, and the crying therein

[libertango]

I was listening to an On the Media report of a US Senate hearing on newspapers. David Simon said, "The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we've actually reached some sort of equilibrium."

My first reaction was, Hang out at a lot of zoning board meetings, do you, David? Why do I find that unlikely for a guy who hasn't had a newspaper job in 14 years?

But the other problem is bigger (and I'll bet you saw this coming): There isn't a "Baltimore zoning board." There's the "Board of Municipal & Zoning Appeals," but their web site uses "the Appeals Board," as their short name.

This is one of the prime problems in journalism. Once upon a time, a reporter could make a Gross Factual Error like that and be secure that no one would check him on it. And even if they did, it's not like anyone else would find out about it, other than their buddies at the water cooler. Today... Well, things have changed a lot in the last 14 years, David.

Comments

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

That isn't a gross factual error. It would be a gross factual error if Simon had said, "Baltimore Zoning Board hearing." I am sure that there were no capital letters in the word balloon over his head, and that he said, "Baltimore zoning board hearing." There is a Baltimore zoning board, and its name is the Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals, just as there is a Seattle zoning board, whose name is the Department of Planning and Development.

I'm with him in doubting that any associate of Ariana Huffington spends much time at such board hearings on a routine basis; I doubt that anyone working for print newspapers spend time there on a routine basis now, either. The old muni hall reporters have been laid off, and their beats are now covered by the crime, science, and world events reporter.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

I understand your first point, but... I see that very much as, "We'll call this thing one term when we're talking to the stupid public, and another term when it's among the grown-ups." I tend to be more, All the way in, or all the way out. Either rename it to match the popular name (a la Federal Express to FedEx), or always refer to it by the formal name.

Re the second point, yeah. It's a distinction without a difference. It's not unlike how I point out that almost all the cultural problems at Wikipedia are present at most encyclopedias, it's just that at Wikipedia you can see the sausages being made. I've seen too many books and articles about Britannica (for example) that run along the lines of, "Mortimer Adler: Threat or Menace?"

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, Simon's was a rather inapposite hypothetical to begin with, insofar as the Huffington Post doesn't purport to focus on Baltimore local politics in the first place. In the day, I don't imagine writers for The Atlantic spent a lot of time hanging out at the Baltimore Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals, either. And that's a closer analogy for intent of publication.

And, frankly, the reason the old muni hall reporters have been laid off is because somewhere along the line print newspaper owners forgot what their own business model was. They're now running around weeping over free content, acting as if they ever made their money selling newspapers. They didn't. The sales price of the newspaper never even covered production costs, let alone putting the paper in profit. Newspapers made their money by selling advertising, specifically by selling the number of eyeballs they commanded on any given day, and calculating that into their advertising rates. Then craigslist came along and ate their classified advertising lunch, and nobody has yet figured out a way to make advertisers pay comparable rates for web advertising as they do/did for print ads. Possibly we're seeing the death of the print-ad revenue based business model, but that is not identical to, and clearly separable from, the death of newspapers, if only the people who run them have the wit to perceive it.

[quirky-teal.livejournal.com]

Don't know anything about the Baltimore situation, but in Los Angeles the Board of Zoning Appeals is exactly that: a Board to which one appeals about zoning decisions which are made by the Planning Department through a public hearing process. Their sole function is to hold appeal hearings. They are an adjunct to the Department, not a substitute name for the Department.