25 responses to
“Does this make me look fat?”

1. Jason said on September 14th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

   > But many other blogs are embar­rass­ing exer­cises in point­less
   > narcissism.

   Unlike hav­ing a bylined col­umn with one’s photo on it, where one can vent one’s spleen on one’s ene­mies, to the befud­dle­ment of 99.9 per­cent of one’s read­ers. That’s not narcissism.

   I enjoyed his con­de­scend­ing descrip­tion of Mr. Harper, too: “when I was edi­tor … and he was one of my polit­i­cal columnists.”

   That’s one step up from your mother say­ing, “I used to change your diapers!”

2. Lance Mannion said on September 14th, 2006 at 1:27 pm

   But, Nance, you’ve already appeared in two of my stories!

   I have to say you were pretty darn fetch­ing in one of them.

3. Marcia said on September 14th, 2006 at 1:42 pm

   I’ve heard (from one of its writ­ers) that the Colum­bus Dis­patch doesn’t allow writer blogs.

4. brian stouder said on September 14th, 2006 at 2:12 pm

   Next aspi­ra­tion: To be a thinly veiled char­ac­ter in a Lance Man­nion short story! Give me long legs and a nice ass, Lance.

   No no no — long legs and a nice RACK — and then the rest falls into place (so to speak)

   fwiw — The Leininger piece struck me as bland and some­what point­less (he could have pressed the essen­tially par­a­sitic nature of some blogs, vis-a-vis con­ven­tional media, for exam­ple. But he men­tioned it in pass­ing and moved on). And before the Harper era began at FWOb, that site seemed like a com­pelling mix of trust­wor­thy and off­beat; and now it’s pre­dictable (more or less) and conventional

5. TS said on September 14th, 2006 at 2:31 pm

   I’ve heard (from one of its writ­ers) that the Colum­bus Dis­patch doesn’t allow writer blogs.

   They don’t need blogs. The paper is a blog, at least Blundo & Stephens and Hallet.

6. Dwight the Troubled Teen said on September 14th, 2006 at 2:41 pm

   But many other blogs are embar­rass­ing exer­cises in point­less narcissism.

   ??? WTF ???

   ALL blogs are exer­cises in point­less narcissism!

7. mary said on September 14th, 2006 at 4:25 pm

   Is Mitch Harper the Apple Jelly guy?

8. nancy said on September 14th, 2006 at 4:29 pm

   No, that’s Frank Gray. He’s a colum­nist for the other FW news­pa­per, and doesn’t blog.

   Mitch is a for­mer state rep­re­sen­ta­tive and lawyer in the Fort. He also runs — you know, in sneak­ers and on his legs — com­pet­i­tively, and orga­nizes var­i­ous 10Ks and so forth.

9. brian stouder said on September 14th, 2006 at 4:30 pm

   No — that’s Frank Grey, who is “on assign­ment” and doing a Sunday-only col­umn for the time being

10. mary said on September 14th, 2006 at 6:43 pm

    Now HERE’S some news:

    MCKEESPORT, Pa. — A woman pleaded guilty to dis­or­derly con­duct in con­nec­tion with a bizarre inci­dent in Feb­ru­ary that resulted in a fake penis being microwaved at a con­ve­nience store.
    Leslye Creighton, 41, of Wilkins­burg, entered the plea Wednes­day, and author­i­ties dropped the same charge against Vin­cent Bostic, 31, of Pitts­burgh, who has agreed to help pay $425 to replace the store’s microwave, police and the couple’s defense attor­ney said.
    Police in McK­eesport, about 10 miles east of Pitts­burgh, said the Feb. 23 inci­dent began when Bostic filled a fake penis with his urine that they said Creighton planned to use to pass a drug test to get a job.
    The two stopped at a GetGo! con­ve­nience store and, after wrap­ping the device in a paper towel, asked a store clerk to heat it up in a microwave, police said. Author­i­ties said they believe Creighton wanted the device heated so the urine inside would be at body tem­per­a­ture dur­ing the drug test.
    The clerk, how­ever, believ­ing the life­like device to be a sev­ered penis, called police.
    Defense attor­ney William Difend­er­fer said Creighton faces a max­i­mum pun­ish­ment of $300 and 90 days in jail when she is sen­tenced Nov. 15 by McK­eesport Dis­trict Judge Doug Reed. Difend­er­fer called it “a humor­ous, but weird, case.”

11. nancy said on September 14th, 2006 at 8:26 pm

    Insult aside, I give the col­umn a “meh.” It feels simul­ta­ne­ously spotty and three years late to the dis­cus­sion, but at the same time I freely acknowl­edge there’s really no tack­ling this ques­tion in 750 words any­more, so some spot­ti­ness just goes with the ter­ri­tory. It’s just too com­pli­cated. How­ever, some of the ques­tions it raises — and Kevin’s columns are always full of big chunks of rhetor­i­cal ques­tions, like we’re sup­posed to clip ‘n’ save for dinner-table dis­cus­sions — can be dis­pensed with in a bumper sticker-length phrase:

    But can the “old�? media attract peo­ple to their Web sites with­out los­ing the cus­tomers, char­ac­ter and rev­enue that made them suc­cess­ful? Online infor­ma­tion appeals to computer-savvy young read­ers, but how can news­pa­pers attract pay­ing cus­tomers if they give their prod­uct away in elec­tronic form?

    First ques­tion: Yes, sorta. Sec­ond ques­tion: Wrong ques­tion. “Pay­ing cus­tomers” don’t sup­port news­pa­pers, pay­ing adver­tis­ers do. What­ever rev­enue is lost by giv­ing the paper away free is muli­plied by not hav­ing to worry about newsprint prices. Of course, then you’re no longer in the news­pa­per busi­ness, which means you can’t play by news­pa­per rules. Not to over­sim­plify, but this is the cen­tral prob­lem that edi­tors and pub­lish­ers are los­ing hair over.

    (One rea­son they’re los­ing hair is because they haven’t quite fig­ured out that “can’t play by news­pa­per rules” also means “don’t have to play by news­pa­per rules.” Change is good, but it’s also terrifying.)

    Kevin again: The for­mer state rep­re­sen­ta­tive makes his liv­ing as an attor­ney. Even so, his polit­i­cal con­tacts and knowl­edge of the com­mu­nity have allowed him to report a few fairly impor­tant local sto­ries first.

    Con­tacts and knowl­edge of the com­mu­nity are not exclu­sive to Mitch Harper. They used to be fairly com­mon in the newspaper’s own news­room. Most days FWOb is a fil­ter, like most blogs; he finds inter­est­ing sto­ries that he can add a lit­tle infor­ma­tion to and posts it. A lot of his “orig­i­nal” report­ing is pretty eccen­tric to his own inter­ests in pol­i­tics and gov­ern­ment; it’s hard to imag­ine many read­ers are com­ing by for the ama­teur video clips of con­gres­sional can­di­dates march­ing in the Gra­bill Days parade.

    But one thing Mitch has been pretty suc­cess­ful at are the gotcha sto­ries that the under­staffed, demor­al­ized News-Sentinel news­room leaves itself wide-open to — the Zach Klein deba­cle, or the cov­er­age of the paper’s own own­er­ship wran­gle last sum­mer, to name but two. Nei­ther of these sto­ries required any more “report­ing” than just pay­ing atten­tion, and yet no one did. It doesn’t take too many of those before you start get­ting a rep­u­ta­tion, not as a news fil­ter, but as a news source.

    Kevin again: Why should you care about any of this? Because (Mar­shall) McLuhan, a noted Cana­dian pro­fes­sor and author, believed soci­eties are defined not by the con­tent of their media, but by the nature of their media. Will “live�? access to infor­ma­tion make us better-informed, more-involved cit­i­zens? Or will the relent­less demand for instant, super­fi­cial news remove tra­di­tional jour­nal­is­tic safe­guards, flood­ing an increas­ingly dis­tracted mar­ket­place with often dubi­ous infor­ma­tion that tit­il­lates but sel­dom sat­is­fies or enlightens?

    Pause for a chuckle at drag­ging McLuhan, “noted Cana­dian pro­fes­sor and author,” into the debate. More rhetor­i­cal ques­tions. What the hell is he talk­ing about? “…often dubi­ous infor­ma­tion that tit­il­lates but sel­dom sat­is­fies or enlight­ens?” You could say that about his own paper. Minus the titillation.

    I think it’s com­pli­cated, but also pretty sim­ple: Infor­ma­tion is valu­able. Good infor­ma­tion is more valu­able. Pre­sen­ta­tion — where and how you get it — mat­ters less than ever. As any­one who’s caught up with the head­lines via Black­Berry can tell you.

    Here’s the last thing, and then I’ll shut up. My fel­low­ship direc­tor tells a story about a friend of his who was direc­tor at Green­field Vil­lage here in Detroit. He asked him what was the most impor­tant thing he’d learned as a cura­tor at a his­tor­i­cal site. The guy said, “That no car­riage maker ever became a suc­cess­ful car maker. That no type­writer com­pany made the tran­si­tion to com­put­er­ized word pro­cess­ing.” (We’ll give him a pass on that one. Even though IBM is now toast.) “That no wheel­wright fig­ured out rub­ber tires in time. And so on.”

    The Next Big Thing in News­gath­er­ing. , in other words, will likely be fig­ured out by peo­ple who aren’t in news­pa­pers now. Scary, and exciting.

12. brian stouder said on September 14th, 2006 at 8:27 pm

    OK Mary — I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed (so to speak) — but if Creighton (the female) was the one who had to take the urine test, why did she fill a penis with the spu­ri­ous urine?

13. brian stouder said on September 14th, 2006 at 9:04 pm

    The Next Big Thing in News­gath­er­ing. , in other words, will likely be fig­ured out by peo­ple who aren’t in news­pa­pers now. Scary, and exciting.

    That’s the inter­est­ing part of this. News­gath­er­ing has an irre­ducible, LL Bean boots-on-the-ground, per­son to per­son nature, how­ever the trans­mis­sion and deliv­ery arrange­ments change.

    When the printed news­pa­pers finally fire their last reporter, and employ only sales reps and computer-geeks, then who will go to the city coun­cil meet­ings, or the school board meet­ings, or the cour­t­house, and report what hap­pened to the rest of us?

    If it defaults into a “wick­a­pe­di­afied” real­ity (when I see wick­ipedia cited as the source for any­thing, I imme­di­ately view the infor­ma­tion pre­sented as about as con­sume­able as a wad of bub­blegum stuck on the under­side of the restau­rant table), then THAT is the point where I will pay for a local internet-delivered news source.

    The thing that a “brand” like The News-Sentinel can sell to me is just exactly that — their impri­matur on the news they present.

    Blogs run as hob­bys by lawyers (or by no-life geeks, or by who-the-hell-knows-who!) are fine when they can link to ‘real’ news sources; but real news is only reli­ably pro­duced by peo­ple ded­i­cated to the process, and edu­cated (both for­mally, and by other careerist jour­nal­ists) to think crit­i­cally and write clearly.

14. Marcia said on September 14th, 2006 at 9:22 pm

    Um, TS, Stephens is a travel writer now. Has been for a long while.

    And don’t you diss on my man Blundo.

15. nancy said on September 14th, 2006 at 9:24 pm

    Oh, and Brian — I can’t fig­ure out that part, either. I had to take a drug test for a job inter­view a cou­ple years ago, and it was pretty tight secu­rity. There was a tem­per­a­ture strip on the cup, the pot was sealed with one of those sani-strips, I was given strict instruc­tions not to flush and the tech­ni­cian sat out­side the whole time.

    Although it’s prob­a­bly eas­ier to carry urine in a handy penis-thingie than any­where else.

    I won­der if they told the clerk it was a burrito.

16. alex said on September 14th, 2006 at 10:38 pm

    Kevin Leininger might have done well to sit in on the Azar Nafizi lec­ture last night at our local uni­ver­sity cam­pus. (She’s the author of the best-selling Read­ing Lolita in Tehran, for those of you who may not know.)

    As a for­eign observer of Amer­i­can cul­ture, she points out that any con­sumer of news would have to assume from what is pre­sented that Baby Suri is as impor­tant as the Iraq occu­pa­tion. Does she look like Tom Cruise or Katie Holmes? Should the U.S. con­tinue its occu­pa­tion or cut its losses? These ques­tions appear to have equal grav­i­tas when pre­sented by Katie Couric, whose Pho­to­Shopped waist­line is also a mat­ter of enor­mous sig­nif­i­cance right up there with wars and hur­ri­canes and jet plane crashes and evi­dently much more impor­tant than the geno­cide in Dar­fur, which rates no men­tion at all.

    The thing Nafizi says about lit­er­a­ture is that it’s truly sub­ver­sive. It’s the one medium that can make peo­ple have empa­thy for those of a dif­fer­ent gen­der or race or eth­nic­ity or time or place — unlike the news, which dumbs every­thing down to one-dimensionality.

    “The Mus­lim world,” a Bushism with a fair amount of trac­tion, is one of those dumb-downs, she says. It takes half the world and makes an enemy out of it, never mind that just like the “Chris­t­ian world” most of its peo­ple are high-minded and humane while only some mis­use the reli­gion for polit­i­cal ends.

    The time is ripe for some lit­er­ary jour­nal­ism. I pre­dict that the ‘blog­gers who can take things in this direc­tion will be the suc­ces­sors to the dying net­work and news­pa­per busi­nesses. Peo­ple are starved for gen­uinely good read­ing and the news­pa­pers aren’t about to pro­vide it. Kevin, even as a colum­nist, might as well be your garden-variety right-of-center ‘blog­ger who watches Bill O’Reilly too much, an uno­rig­i­nal didact who thinks every prob­lem in the world can be traced to an elit­ist lib­eral con­spir­acy ema­nat­ing from the Ivy League uni­ver­si­ties he wasn’t smart or rich enough to attend. Today, amaz­ingly, was just one of the few instances in recent mem­ory where he wasn’t on that bent.

17. mary said on September 15th, 2006 at 2:42 pm

    Maybe all she had with her that was handy for urine heat­ing was a fake penis.

18. Danny said on September 15th, 2006 at 3:47 pm

    Yeah, proabably so. Just the other day our local 7 – 11 ran out of sty­ro­foam cof­fee cups. Luck­ily they had a stock of fake penis’ that every­one was able to use for their cof­fees for the morn­ing commute.

19. mary said on September 15th, 2006 at 3:54 pm

    It prob­aby didn’t work too well, though. Most cars only have cup holders.

20. Bob said on September 15th, 2006 at 4:00 pm

    What defines a suc­cess­ful car maker?

    Stude­baker built wag­ons, fine car­riages and other horse-drawn vehi­cles, and then built cars, trucks and mil­i­tary vehi­cles. Their pre-WWII cars were highly regarded, and they were first to intro­duce come out with a totally new design after the war, when Ford, GM and Chrysler were still offer­ing warmed-over pre-war mod­els. They were a sig­nif­i­cant player in the auto indus­try into the 1950s.

21. Danny said on September 15th, 2006 at 4:04 pm

    So Stude­baker pio­neered fake-penis-coffee-cup hold­ers? I did not know that. They cer­tainly were ahead of their time.

22. mary said on September 15th, 2006 at 4:06 pm

    I always won­dered what that odd space was in the dash­board (they didn’t have con­soles then) of my uncle’s studebaker.

23. Danny said on September 15th, 2006 at 4:11 pm

    Yeah, I think that was the year that Stude­baker intro­duced the “Woody.”

24. basset said on September 16th, 2006 at 9:52 am

    Stude­baker wasn’t nearly as bureau­cratic as the big car com­pa­nies… much eas­ier to do stuff like that on a Lark…

25. Dorothy said on September 17th, 2006 at 9:24 am

    You guys had too much fun with this story while I was at the beach.

    Hey — and I admit this with dubi­ous pride — I grad­u­ated from Wilkins­burg High School, the same Wilkins­burg in the arti­cle Mary ref­er­enced! I rec­og­nize NO names from that story, I might add. I escaped Wilkins­burg in 1979.