Is there any phrase in journalism more compelling than “fiery crash?” Just saying it makes my mouth water. We had one this morning in Detroit, which followed another Pavlovian term, “high-speed chase.” Rumor has it a TV station had video, which I didn’t see; the TV doesn’t go on until late in the day at Casa NN.C, and that station in particular, the Fox affiliate, gives me bleeding hives.

Besides, if you wait, sooner or later everything goes on YouTube. Note ironic detail: Although the truck was stolen and the driver fleeing police, the crash was actually precipitated by another motorist, who failed to yield and turned left in front of the truck.

I hate police chases. We’ve had a couple of late hereabouts, and while they’ve all ended the way they’re “supposed” to — i.e., with the culprit smashing into something and injuring only himself — it’s only a matter of time before one doesn’t. What if the truck this morning had hit that minivan broadside and killed not only himself, but the people in the van? We’d have multiple deaths for a stolen car, a crime that happens approximately 11 zillion times a day around here. I know police give a great deal of thought to these things and don’t enter into them lightly, but there’s an adrenaline thing that takes over, too.

Pals, I’m working on a story this morning, trying to get it done a day early so I can spend tomorrow prepping for a week of vacay. Why don’t you guys suggest the bloggage today? If I had more time, I’d wade into this account of the fiery crash and parse the odd mix of journalese, euphemism and can’t-talk-very-well-on-live-TV language that comprises the reporter’s stand-up. The driver is “deceased in the vehicle,” which would make a great name for a band. (And note the signs on the post as the cameras pan by: HOUSES FOR SALE $9,000 or best cash offer. Good times.)

You carry the ball for a while, and I’ll be back later.

I have a feeling John McIntyre is one of those copy-desk chiefs I would have loved with an all-consuming passion right up until the moment I didn’t. Recently released from the Baltimore Sun, he now writes a blog at…

(May I just pause for a moment and marvel at how I could almost put that sentence on a user key? Name of Journalist worked at Name of Newspaper for XX years, was [laid off/bought out] in Year and now keeps a blog at URL. While you’re spending your richly subsidized retirement updating your Facebook friends on your golf handicap, publishers of the world, I hope you spend a few moments considering you once had a workforce that cannot stop working, who took lousy/so-so money for most of their careers and now do it free. And you flushed it away. Although that’s not what you’re thinking, is it? You’re thinking, “I could have paid them even less and bumped the profit margin a few more points. Dumb me!”)

Back to McIntyre: He, like many of us, has been considering the Strange Case of Alessandra Stanley, the New York Times’ TV critic and corrections machine. Her “appraisal” of Walter Cronkite contained seven errors. Clark Hoyt, the NYT public editor, tries to get to the bottom of it:

In her haste, she said, she looked up the dates for two big stories that Cronkite covered — the assassination of Martin Luther King and the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon — and copied them incorrectly. She wrote that Cronkite stormed the beaches on D-Day when he actually covered the invasion from a B-17 bomber. She never meant that literally, she said. “I didn’t reread it carefully enough to see people would think he was on the sands of Omaha Beach.”

It gets better:

For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued. Until the Cronkite errors, she was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year. Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention.

I could go on like this for many, many words and you know what I will say, so let’s not, and instead turn to McIntyre’s central advice to writers, because it is universal, no matter what your job:

You, the reporter/writer, are responsible for the accuracy of what you write. It is your job to make sure that every statement of fact, every quotation, is represented accurately. If you slap something together and turn it in assuming that someone else will clean up after you, you are committing malpractice.

This should go without saying, for everybody in every job, and yet, it happens every day. About six weeks into my own stint on the copy desk, after dealing with yet another editor who shrugged when I pointed out he’d just turned over a story to me, the paper’s last line of defense, with sentence fragments and repetitive passages and weird tangents, etc. … I feel the Saigon flashback starting already. Anyway, I told my own boss, McIntyre’s equivalent, that I finally understood exactly what Holden Caulfiend was talking about when he said he was the catcher in the rye. All those stories are running toward the cliff, and I have to catch them before they pitch over the edge. You get this one, and another one slips right by you, and — (descending whistle sound) splat.

If only there were fewer of them. If only the previous editor had worked a little harder on it. But as one whose true job was as a writer, to me it always came down to the source. If only the reporter had taken her job seriously in the first place. But there are lots of Alessandra Stanleys out there, or were, writers who think it’s not their job to look up silly things like how, precisely, Walter Cronkite covered D-Day, or the date of the moon landing, or anything else. “That’s the copy desk’s job” — some of them would actually say that. They were big-picture people. Details were for the anal nitpickers in the thick glasses.

No matter what your job, if you work upstream of the cliff, you owe it to everyone to do it the best you can, at every stage. Especially now. Unless you’re Alessandra Stanley, evidently.

I said at the beginning of this tedious little lecture that I probably would love McIntyre until I didn’t. Sooner or later, all writers and editors face that estrangement. Maybe it comes over the latter’s hair-splitting over convince and persuade, or the teeny lecture they want you to listen to, the one where they stand over your desk and explain the difference between an argument and a quarrel. (I know I’ve used the argument/quarrel anecdote more than once, but the way that particular copy editor brandished that distinction, the smugness in his voice as he took credit for saving 60,000 households from the horror of seeing the wrong word describing what happened before a drug-related shooting– well, it still rankles. Especially when he was also fond of disappearing on deadline to chat up the interns in the hall. See above. Do your job.)

A little bloggage before I go:

Someone sent me this Modern Love column with a note: “How many people I wonder fail to understand that one prson’s meltdown is more about that person and not the spouse?” I’m not a big fan of Modern Love, but this one was worth reading.

< marilyn voice > Happy birthday, Mr. President: < /marilyn voice > Now go get yourself a lava cake.

It’s just like sitting around someone’s basement in high school! Highdeas — a place you can post the great ideas you get when you’re stoned. My favorite from the first page: a full body tattoo on your backside, so when you were naked ( you would need to be bald too), it would like like a person walking backwards, or vise versa It’s the “you would need to be bald too” part that cracked me up.

I think Time magazine touched this story a while back. Certainly some smart business reporter must have done it by now, too, looking at the dark world of the internet, where otherwise straight-arrow corporations come out to play.

Exhibit A: Gillette offers you tips on how to shave your groin. Why would you do this? Because “when there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.” Ha ha, let’s pause for a moment and listen to Don Draper spin in his grave for a moment. (Lung cancer took him. Too soon.) For the curious, Gillette offers similar videos covering armpits, chest, head, and back. (The videos use animation, not live models, so they’re SFW.)

Exhibit B: Budweiser recycles the old standby — guy buying porn gets embarrassed — into a Bud Light commercial. Two minutes of jokey fun about magazines called Tongue in Cheeks, and you don’t even notice you’re watching a commercial for watery beer. I have to say, however, that the casting is perfect — that guy looks exactly like the sort of cubicle drone who picks up a sixer of Bud Light on the way home from work, then decides to make a night of it with a dirty magazine. The real star of the show is the other customer in line, who is probably buying something other than beer.

I’m sure there are dozens more out there. Marketers aren’t stupid. Pube-shavers need a lot of razor blades. So you can’t run a spot like that on “30 Rock” — who cares? If they don’t tell you how to do it, someone else will, and they’re not as likely to tout your products. Sooner or later this stuff will end up on mainstream TV, and so you’d best watch those and get ready, because I’m sure Rod Dreher is already preparing a big whiny blog post on them, only by then he’ll be writing for the goddamn New York Times. (Sooner or later Ross Douchehat will run out of material.)

You know what else happens when you clear away the underbrush, gents? You look like the kind of guy who thinks an optical illusion really fools something other than the eye. Go buy some Bud Light.

Here’s another video I found en route to looking up the Gillette spots. By the hit count I may be the last American to actually see it, but still recommended.

Another scorcher ahead — mid-90s, we’re promised. So while we’re all sitting in the nice a/c, contemplate what the hell with Gov. Sanford. Argentina? Did he go for a spur-of-the-moment tango lesson? I could hear Keith Olbermann in his second-most insufferable persona last night beating this dead horse to a bloody pulp, and this isn’t going to help. But still — this guy sounds like he has a few screws loose.

You’ll be living in a van down by the river! Another gem from Detroitblog, a portrait of one of those singular community-activist types that make city life worth living:

In the early ’80s Hume bid on a neighboring city-owned marina, won as the low bidder, then the city canceled the sale without clear explanation. Hume sued, the city settled. He took the money, bought video cameras and started a company called Public Eye Video, a one-man operation that taped all council meetings after he found crazy statements made by council members never made it into the meeting minutes. “I videotaped their asses, so at least somebody would have a record of what the fuck they’re saying,” he says.

It drove them nuts. They tried to shut him down, but learned they couldn’t because it was a public meeting and he had a right to record it. Then they tried to cut off his use of their electricity, but he found a way to buy it directly from the City-County Building authorities instead. At one point council member Kay Everett lost it in front of his camera, shouting at Hume, “You’re very close to getting this thing rammed down your throat!”

As I’ve said many times in the last few years: And people wonder why I love this crazy-ass town.

Headline of the day: “‘You Light Up My Life’ Composer is Criminal Sex Monster, Naturally.” Hell yes.

Off to beat the day into submission. I suspect it’ll be sweaty.

Up north to a wedding this weekend. Always fun to attend weddings. They beat funerals, for one thing. There’s cake. And usually wine, and frequently champagne.

There was certainly no shortage at this wedding, which was held in the northern Michigan woods. Not all the way off the grid, but edging in that direction — catering, but with porta-potties and an explicit warning from the wedding couple not to wear heels, because of the walk in from the road, which was decidedly unfriendly to delicate footwear. But once back there, it was a little oasis of loveliness, with a blue color scheme. The bride wore a $30 gown she got at Goodwill and had altered to her taste; why wear Vera Wang to trail behind you down a dirt path en route to the forest clearing? Any last-minute fit alterations just went with the color scheme:

The couple was said to be going for an effect that was “rustic, not redneck.” I’d say they succeeded. All guests were invited to camp on the surrounding acreage, and many took them up on it. We didn’t, and stayed at another guest’s nearby hunting cabin, which had the benefit of window screens on a night when the mosquitos were feeling particularly bloodthirsty. On the other hand, I bet the afterparty was a blast.

Leaving, it occurred to me the last wedding I went to in northern Michigan was also held right around the summer solstice. The sky after 10 p.m., as we were leaving:

They prize summer in the north. “Three months of bad sledding,” etc.

That was my weekend. How was yours?

On the way we passed the Perma-Log Co., a company about which the name says everything. I regret that the website doesn’t feature the other perma-items from the company’s acreage on M-33, which included perma-Stonehenge and perma-Easter Island heads. Both of which would be perma-cool in our front yard, I think. (CORRECTION, 9/2: Website updated. Check out Easter Island, Michigan.) Northern Michigan kitsch doesn’t have quite the same feel as that of, say, southern Ohio. Not so many fat ladies bending over or plywood silhouettes of a guy leaning against a tree, but there’s nothing like a flying-bird windmill to let you know you’re not in the city anymore.

Actually, there are lots of ways to tell you’re not in the city, once you get out of it, headed north. The entire economy of northern Michigan, never robust in the first place, seems to rest on competition between hospitals to land your next heart attack, at least to judge from the billboards. In between those billboards are other billboards advertising schools that can get you in a scrub top and working in the wide-open world of health care faster than the next one. Nothing really says, “We are a region of the obese and old” more clearly than this. I bet, in places like Portland and California, you might see the occasional ad for sports-medicine and laparoscopic knee surgery.

But we also sat with one of our filmmaking party, who moonlights as a DJ. One of his gigs is the local women’s roller-derby team, and he shared their favorite requests — 2 Live Crew, and assorted other acts whose lyrics feature maximum degradation of women. This tickles me, as it suggests rollergirls know more about what feminism entails than those who have PhDs in gender studies. There’s something about picturing these jammers and blockers, any one of whom could kill you with her bare hands, throwing ’em up to “Me So Horny” that cracks me up.

Bloggage? Surrrreee:

We’ve had a local story breaking in the past few days, with the Fox affiliate leading the way. The coverage — all bluster, posturing and “as I told you exclusively” — has been excruciating, but not as excruciating as this, which I beg you to watch, because besides being excruciating, it’s also sort of awesome.

The etiquette of the CrackBerry, something I admit I struggle with myself. Nothing like those little interstitial spaces in life for multitasking on your smartphone, I always say. Nothing like a little Wurdle to fill up a two-minute bathroom break in a meeting. When does it cross the line into rudeness? A question for our time.

My question for today is, can I get everything done that I have to get done? Only if I sign off now and go pick the dog up from the vet’s boarding kennel. Latuh.

I read both Detroit dailies every day, not every word but a lot of them, usually returning to the websites several times. I think the Freep may have lost me for good today. I don’t know what the print edition looks like, but you know what the lead story is on the website? (Underneath the Red Wings package, of course; I mean, the bankruptcy of the cornerstone of the underlying industry that supports a whole region might be news, but hey — priorities, people!)

A Mitch Albom column.

A really stupid one.

One with lots of one-sentence paragraphs and padding creative white space.

Oh, and a repetitive catch phrase, like a refrain, because you know Mitch is a songwriter, too.

It is: All fall down.

It’s hard for a newspaper to insult me, these days. I’ve gotten used to the degradation. I told my boss the other day, the one I farm news for, that the hardest thing about this job has been watching the steady decline of newspapers over the last three years. There was an oncology conference in Florida this week, a big one, that we were tracking for our clients. Monday’s Wall Street Journal and New York Times had several stories on the news coming out of it, about new cancer drugs and therapies. So I made sure to visit the website of the local paper, once one of the finest papers in the south, in search of stories. They had punted it to the AP.

But Mitch Albom writing about General Motors? That might just do it for me. I can’t even stand to take it apart for laughs, it’s so depressing and stupid. OK, one line:

We have each other.

What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

Nothing like starting the first day of the rest of Michigan’s life on a high note, I always say.

I’m starting to like these one-sentence paragraphs. I think that extra white space really gives flaccid prose that extra oomph, don’t you think?

It’s sort of like the very short sentences in children’s books:

Look, Sally, look. Mitch is writing a column. See Mitch write. Write, Mitch, write. See Mitch write while he’s doing his radio show. Multi-task, Mitch, multi-task. Mitch is quoting the governor: Gov. Jennifer Granholm told me Monday on WJR. Synergy, Mitch, synergy.

OK, that’s not funny. Here’s what is: I’d be willing to bet a mortgage payment that Mitch makes at least $200K from his Free Press revenue stream, perhaps more. They could get Sweet Juniper for half that, the columns would be better, he’s shoot his own photos and show up in the office more. I know I’ve made this suggestion before, but it bears repeating.

Well. It’s a bad day in Michigan, innit? We are officially in free fall. I’m now working under the assumption we are capital-F you-know-what. For a while now, I’ve been asking old-timers, “Is this the worst recession you’ve seen in Michigan?” and they all say, “No, early ’80s were worse.” That was the “Roger & Me” downturn, the tent cities in Houston, the “Continental Drift” migration of the blue-collar working class to the south. They don’t say that anymore.

Fortunately, we still have the solace of television. Dexter posted this excellent interview with Vince Gilligan, creator of “Breaking Bad,” which just finished its second season. I was a little worried as the season began; whereas last year’s had a fairly constant undertone of comedy, year two dawned under dark, dark clouds. Gilligan faced the same problem David Chase did with “The Sopranos,” i.e., how do you make a show with an evil character at its heart and still make viewers want to tune in? I remember Chase saying at the time how frustrating he found it to hear viewers describe Tony as a nice guy, when he clearly wasn’t. I think the turning point for viewers came in that show’s second season, too, with the Scatino bust-out and subsequent whacking of Big Pussy. You really couldn’t hold on to your illusions after that.

Walt had more sympathy going for him; the guy had cancer, and his turn to meth cooking was initially because he felt he had to leave a grubstake behind for his family. So Gilligan had to rub our faces in the fact even a noble end doesn’t justify the evil means, and the first few episodes were so, so bleak. But Chase figured it out — when you need relief, turn to the other characters. And so we got buffoons like Paulie Walnuts and sweet, clueless Adriana to leaven Tony’s march into hell. Gilligan did, too, and found depth in the characters of Skyler and Jesse and even Hank the DEA agent. Jesse, Walt’s toddler-dressed accomplice, turns out to be the one who most regrets his actions, and his suicidal depression at the end of this season will be interesting to watch in the next.

And in the meantime, we have “True Blood” to look forward to, and then “Mad Men,” coming back in August. If we still have cable then, that is. You never know.

Not much bloggage on this depressing day, but what I have is amusing: my left armpit smells while my right one doesn’t. this isn’t even a shower issue, it smells right after a shower — Oversharers on Twitter. HT: Brother Jim.

Off to the gym. Because if only the strong survive, I want to at least be able to carry one of their suitcases.

I’ve never been a fan of his fiction, but I’m thinking maybe Harlan Ellison is a man worth admiring:

Nine years ago, Mr. Ellison sued Internet service providers for failing to stop a user from posting four of his stories to an online newsgroup. Since settling that suit, he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. “If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,” he said.

Now there’s a copyright warrior I could march into battle with. Sooner or later something will cut him down; I’ve come to the realization that the gurus are right, you can’t fight free, even law-abiding people don’t think it’s stealing when the person on the other end is just some face on a back cover, and anyway they’re probably rich and I’m not, so go ahead and download their book onto your Kindle, what’s the harm?

I’m getting ahead of myself.

The NYT looks at the latest frontier in copyright theft — books. Until now, stealing books didn’t pay, so to speak, but with the Kindle and other e-readers, the doors are open:

Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, which invite users to upload documents like college theses and self-published novels, have been the target of industry grumbling in recent weeks, as illegal reproductions of popular titles have turned up on them. Trip Adler, chief executive of Scribd, said it was his “gut feeling” that unauthorized editions represented only a small fraction of the site’s content. …An example of copyrighted material on Scribd recently included a digital version of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” a collection of fairy tales by J. K. Rowling. One commenter, posting as vicious-9690, wrote “thx for posting it up ur like the robinhood of ebooks.”

I’m trying to separate my intellectual reaction from that of my gut, which thinks vicious-9690 is most likely a 300-pound jerkoff with one hand buried in his pants and the other in a box of Froot Loops or, as Stephen King puts it succinctly later in the story:

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

I suspect King is wrong, that there are Russian and Chinese and American hackers working on sites to sell the Twilight novels for half off the retail e-reader price. Or maybe not — maybe this is all a matter of the cheap and sleazy undercutting the talented and successful. “The robinhood of ebooks” says a lot about the ignorant mindset of the people who do this, as Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. I’ve known a few authors in my life, and they range from middle class to upper-middle. A few more can’t quit their day jobs (usually teaching). All of them work harder than most of us, and if you saw what they earn for every copy they sell, you’d be amazed — it’s far less than you probably think. The Stephen Kings and Stephenie Meyers and J.K. Rowlings are rare exceptions.

So bully for Ellison and his 240 takedown letters. He may be fighting a losing battle, but he’s on the side of the angels. (I sent a takedown letter of my own a while back. It was a beautiful feeling.)

So, a little bloggage? Sure:

Of all the things written about Elizabeth Edwards, this is the best. And the saddest: It’s from Double X, the spinoff of the XX blog at Slate, which I’m still exploring.

As someone who wrote about the Vanessa Williams/Miss America explosion a thousand years ago, there’s something about seeing a headline like this — Pageant Double Standard? Steamy Photos of Miss Rhode Island Won’t Threaten Her Crown — that makes me feel 1,001 years old.

Dear Tom Friedman: In the past eight years my feelings about you have moved from admiration, to grudging admiration, to dislike, and now to contempt. With good reason, you greedy bastard.

We saw the preview for “Up” at the movies the other day. I can’t wait. Roger didn’t have to.

I have so much work to do this week I feel pre-emptively crippled by it. So I think I’ll do a little, right now.

I’m criminally tired today, to the point that a third cup of coffee is not the solution. What is? Short Attention Span Bloggage Theater, that’s what!

A lede that made me laugh:

British Oscar winner Kate Winslet has revealed exclusively to marie claire magazine that she was bullied as a child and lived with the nickname ‘Blubber’.

When I started as a freelancer, I thought maybe I’d pitch some stuff to women’s magazines, even though other freelancers warned me off with waving arms — “they’re run by insane people, they make ridiculous assignments, they change their minds when you’re 90 percent done and expect you to redo the whole thing for no more money, and they take forever to pay.” I never did much pitching to them, as it turned out; they didn’t like my ideas, so I turned my efforts elsewhere. The only person I’ve even heard of who is successful with the lady books writes under a pseudonym, so as not to sully her more upmarket reputation as an respected essayist.

But mostly I’m discouraged by, you know, reading them. Someone sat down at a keyboard and had to actually write that stuff about Kate Winslet. I hope they had as much fun writing as I did reading. It’s the “has revealed exclusively” that slays me every time, that Hedda Hopper/Deadline USA/stop-the-presses usage that only serves to underline the triviality of the revelation. It’s a staple on the gossip blogs. Someone is always revealing something exclusively to some ink-stained hack. In fact, I think they’ll keep calling themselves ink-stained hacks well into this century, long after ink has gone the way of quill pens.

That was my favorite part of “Shakespeare in Love” — the scenes of Will at work, sharpening his pens, dipping and scratching, the ink gradually spreading up his fingers. You had to be motivated to be a writer, once. Which reminds me of my favorite passage from that Christopher Buckley piece we discussed earlier in the week:

He fired up his computers. He hunched unsteadily over his keyboard. I hovered behind, ready to catch him if he pitched forward.

“I’m going to have to dictate to you,” he said.

“I’m a little rusty at WordStar,” I said. “It’s been a quarter-century or so.”

Pup still used the word-processing system he first learned in the early 1980s. Generations of his computer gurus had had to install this antiquated system in his increasingly sophisticated computers, which were like F-22 fighter jets with the controls of a Sopwith Camel.

WordStar, jeez. I hadn’t thought of that in a thousand years. I can’t even remember what word processor I used back in the Cenozoic era, on my very first IBM PC — WordPerfect, maybe? The thing required so many floppy swaps that I went back to the typewriter after the novelty wore off, and stayed there for a few years, until we bought our first Mac and adopted MS Word, a program I have come to loathe. Lately I’ve been doing most of my in-and-out writing on Google Docs. Walter Feigenson has an amusing recollection on his intersection with the Buckleys and WordStar, prompted by the same passage.

Right before my last Mac died I downloaded WriteRoom, which is sort of like WordStar for those of us who suffer from fatigue-induced ADD — green letters, black screen, no distractions.

Finally, Jim at Sweet Juniper is not only ten times the reporter I am, he puts me to shame with his curiosity. He’s the full-time dad to two little kids, and he still finds time to photograph dozens of bottles of hobo pee. If you don’t click that link, you will be sorry.

I was working my way through this story about today’s GOP dilemma — a broader party or a purer one? the headline asks — when it occurred to me this is exactly what some were saying, with great pleasure, when the current pope was elected. It would be a smaller church once Benedict XVI drove out all the lesser souls, but a purer one, and yes, that was exactly the word they used — purer. And while the Catholic church and the Republican party have very different missions in the world, it’s interesting that both are having the very same discussion, isn’t it?

I’d make my own observations about it, but as I may have told you: I’m tired. You feel free.

And now it’s 10 a.m. Work beckons.

The newspaper meltdown has moved beyond tragedy and well into farce. Michael Miner at the Chicago Reader reports on a journalism awards banquet in that great city. One of the winners, Melissa Isaacson, had been laid off two days previous. She heard her name called, went up to collect her plaque, and found…

…(By) the time she made her way up front to accept her plaque it had disappeared. That’s because (still-employed Tribune managing editor Jane) Hirt had hopped up from the Tribune table next to the dais to claim it for the Tribune. “My friends asked me later if I got to bask in any of the applause,” says Isaacson, “but there was no basking. I had to go find my award.”

I think Isaacson got the best part of this deal. She lost a plaque, but gained a much better story she can tell for the rest of her life. The plaques I gathered in my cursed career are all in a box in the basement somewhere, and the most good any of them did me was when we used one of Alan’s AP awards to prop open a window with broken sash cords. It was a little bust of Mark Twain, and was just the right height to do the job. (This was in our home office, and I found inspiration in his little golden face, holding up my window on warm days. Twain would have appreciated it, too.)

And I remember when the debate over journalism awards was about Gannett, famed at one time for buying great papers, turning them into pale imitations of their former selves, and then buying ads that claimed all its papers’ Pultizers for itself, even those won before under previous ownership. (Gannett is now famed for surviving into the current era.) Times have changed.

The understatement of the year, that.

So how is your week going? I’ve been tracking swine flu. This is part of my night-shift job, editing health-care news. It leaves me both optimistic and, well, not. The optimism comes when I reflect on what a marvel our public-health system is when it works well, and so far, I think it’s working well. You’re already hearing the usual naysayers, pointing out that tens of thousands die from the flu in a normal year, that most people are recovering from this particular variety just fine, that once again, the government is spreading panic, etc.

I would advise these folks to read past the second paragraph. The public-health emergency declared over the weekend, as was pointed out in nearly every story, was mostly a formality. The comparison was to declaring a tropical storm a hurricane; it frees up money and staff to work on it, and is not even close to a cry to run for the hills. A global pandemic, even of a viral illness most will sail through with little more than lost time from work, is nothing to sneeze at. (Sorry.)

The discouragement comes from the realization that despite all these professionals and this modern information-dissemination system, we really remain incredibly ignorant of some pretty simple things about our health. You know how many stories have moved assuring people that they cannot get swine flu from eating pork? I’ll tell you: Scores. The confusion comes from something Alan used to harp about all the time when he was a health reporter: We don’t really know what flu is. It’s a respiratory illness. It affects the lungs. You get it when people cough their germs in the air nearby, and they fly over to you and make themselves at home. But because we’ve christened every case of stomach upset “stomach flu,” it’s probably natural that some will figure it comes from something you ate.

Anyway, it’s probably a good time to short your pork futures.

In health journalism, as in all things, there’s a huge gap between the best and the rest. The best are incredible; my shift covers publication of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today, and all three have ace health reporters who not only know their beats, but can explain them capably to the average reader. And then there’s the rest:

“It’s a fine line between educating people and frightening them,” said Dr. Marvin J. Tenenbaum, the director of medicine at St. Francis Hospital on Long Island. He has been making the rounds of patients and responding to their concerns about the outbreak, concerns that he said had been amplified by patients’ watching cable news in their hospital beds.

Even as news anchors preach caution and pledge that they do not want to cause undue anxiety, the sheer demands of the 24-hour news cycle of cable news and the Internet have amplified the story. Typifying the sometimes overheated coverage, a Fox News Channel commercial on Wednesday exclaimed that “swine flu plagues the nation” and urged viewers to tune into prime-time coverage.

And you know what? The reporting was probably OK. But when you try to boil a story down to a phrase in the promo department, you come up with “plagues the nation,” and the good work goes down the drain.

All I have to add is: Wash hands frequently. Avoid Mexico for now. And read the good newspapers.

I’m late today, so just brief bloggage:

It’s true that editorial cartoons in newspapers are true relics of a time gone by. In an era when anyone can be a Photoshop cartoonist, when Get Your War On shows the hidden humor in MS Word clip art, there’s something just sooo 19th century about the sketch at the top of the ed page. On the other hand, there are still a few truly gifted practitioners still at it. The times that editorial cartoons have made me laugh, chances are the artist was Mike Peters.

Happy hump day, all.

Yesterday I received an e-mail forward, the original sender a respected, recently bought-out Detroit columnist, announcing his new position with an internet startup that shall remain nameless. It’s not “hyperlocal” but it is zip code-targeted, and since I have my own startup with a similar model, of course I checked it out.

Hmm. Reuters, Reuters, Reuters, no local copy yet, more Reuters and oh look, here’s a story with a byline and dateline, followed by an abbreviation of the site name, which in my world signifies locally produced, original content. (By Cubby Reporter, COPENHAGEN (AP) — like that.) It’s a story out of Maryland and it’s locally sourced, tightly written and professionally presented. Which means it’s time to fire up the Google and, oh my, whaddaya know, it’s stolen.

Down to the last comma, it’s stolen. Only the byline is changed, which I’m sure would come as a surprise to the reporter who wore away his shoe leather getting it in his employer’s paper. So I checked out another story on the main page, also branded with a byline and the site’s name, and it’s stolen, too. From the Associated Press. So. E-mails to the thief and the victims, screen caps for all, and my work as Junior Journalism Detective is done, except for a small rant:

I AM SICK TO DEATH OF THIS SHIT. In my research yesterday, I found a few press releases about this startup, all crowing that they intended to pick up the pieces of the shattered newspaper business’ advertising base. “There’s a new paper boy in town,” was the money quote from the local contact, an ex-radio guy. Well, the new paper boy is delivering crap. Today’s front page has a story on swine flu with no fewer than four bylines, all with the site’s local-content signifier. Two are associated with various conspiracy websites and one runs an online “vaccine information center” that — I hope you are not surprised by this — opposes mandatory childhood vaccination. And that’s who’s writing about swine flu. (And yes, I suspect they don’t know they’re writing about swine flu for this particular website, but I only work on behalf of real journalists. They can enforce their own copyright, if they care to.)

I read some comments from a fellow print journalist the other day, speculating that this is really only the beginning of the end, that the next stable business model for legitimate journalism is at least a generation away, maybe two. In the interim, we’ve got a long walk through a dark forest to look forward to.

The proprietor of the thievin’ site replied to my e-mail yesterday, apologizing for this unfortunate incident, claiming it was the result of a dishonest “user:”

We get 100’s of articles submitted every day by users. We try and go through them and validate them but some slip through the cracks.

I used to think the low entry bar to journalism was a good thing. We’re not a profession; we’re barely even a craft. If you can tell a story to someone else, you can be a journalist. Come, join the marketplace of ideas. Now I’m not so sure.

Rant over.

I’m looking out at a chill rain, alas, and it feels very British, for some reason. The last few days, the temperature was in the 80s, with a strong, hot wind blasting out of the southwest, air imported from Texas or somewhere. It was enough to awaken all the flowers, push the last tulip open and make the weeping cherries weep. It’s times like this I look out the window at all this new green and think: I am so glad I don’t have pollen allergies. Imagine suffering through a winter like we just had, and then finally seeing spring arrive, only to greet it with? Suffering.

Not much bloggage today; you guys have already seen the 747-buzzing-New-York pictures, so no need for me to call attention to them here. But speaking of copyright, I have bookmarked the blog of the increasingly tiresome Lawrence Lessig, and it was through him that I found this NPR story on novelist Mark Helprin, who has stepped forward as spokesman for the pro-copyright argument. The story contains an excerpt from a book he’s recently published on the subject. If only we had a less windy spokesman:

At age fourteen, on a cheap three-speed Robin Hood bicycle that my father inexplicably (to me) provided as a replacement for a magnificent English touring cycle, the color of a Weimaraner, that I had left to rust in the rain, I set out on a trip across most of the country. A great deal happened in those months: I was not many miles away from Earnest Hemingway on a sunny July morning in Idaho at the instant of his death; in the lobby of an office building in Arizona, Barry Goldwater informed me that I was not permitted to carry the hunting knife that hung from my belt; and with what now seems like a remarkably small number of other visitors to Zion National Park, I listened to a park ranger’s radio as the Berlin Wall crisis unfolded. In regard to copyright, property, and decency, the pertinent incident occurred in a field in Iowa.

A crowdsourced rewrite of that paragraph could only improve it. At least I hope so.

OK, 10 a.m. cometh and I have lots of work today. Take it away, lovely readers.

Such a bouquet of delights was the NYT magazine yesterday. (I know the magazine publishes online a few days beforehand, but I’m ol’-skool, and wait for the pleasures of Sunday morning and its coffee and waffles.) I was looking forward to Christopher Buckley’s memoir excerpt, after noting Brother Rod and the Pontificatin’ Pedants wringing their damp hands over it earlier in the week. Is this Christopher Buckley’s “Mommie Dearest?” Rod wondered, describing the Buckley scion’s portrait of his mother as a “mean, lying bitch.”

After taking my own measure of the piece, I can say it must be difficult to go through life as a writer who is unable to actually, you know, read. It’s true that Buckley did acknowledge his parents’ many faults, which I guess in Outer Wingnuttia is a capital offense, but I don’t see how anyone could read the portions of “Losing Mum and Pup” that were published this weekend and come away with the idea that the surviving Buckley is getting even somehow. This is an enormously affectionate portrait of two complicated people who had a full complement of virtues and flaws. Normal adults know this is the way of the world, but in a culture that idolizes The Family, I guess it’s better to sweep these difficult truths under the rug and never speak of them again.

I don’t get it. But here’s what I know: Writers, particularly memoirists, are charged with one job over all others — telling the truth. If you can’t tell the truth — and that is perfectly fine, not every truth must be told — don’t even pick up your pen. Keep your mouth shut. You don’t have to wallow in the bad stuff; part of telling the truth is telling the whole truth, painting the lights and the darks, because only a portrait with a full range of tones can come anywhere close to a fair rendering.

Stipulated: The truth will vary from person to person. The truth is not the same as accuracy. The truth is never the whole truth, and rarely nothing but. But for Christopher Buckley to publish a book that does nothing but underline the fantasy others have about what his parents “must” have been like — that would be a lie. The world has enough lying writers. (All of these stipulations are themes in Laura Lippman’s excellent “Life Sentences,” now available at an Amazon kickback link near you.)

You know the first column that really landed Tim Goeglein on my radar? It was something he wrote about his parents after one of their anniversaries, about how their thousand-year marriage had been blessed personally every day by Jesus, who guided their lives down to the last detail, and as such kept them from ever making a serious mistake or speaking a cross word, and how he personally handed over every one of their children in a holy glow of pure white light, and every one of those children was brought up in the way of the cross, and blah blah blah.

I thought: The bullshit is strong in this one. He bears watching.

Goeglein was a guest at the Buckleys’ from time to time, not that he ever dropped their names, but I remember his making some reference to “my friend Pat” in a column that was obviously Mrs. B. It was right after William F.’s death that I went looking to see if he’d written anything about conservatism’s fallen lion, and, well, we know how that turned out.

Lesson: Tell the truth. (My truth: I have perhaps embroidered the details of that Tim column. But not by much! More truth: I met Christopher Buckley once, at a library event. He was charming at an Olympic level. Whatever flaws his parents had, they knew how to raise a son to hold up his end in social situations.)

Elsewhere in the magazine, Virginia Heffernan takes a look at reader comments, a feature-not-bug of legit publications that I suspect we’ll be wrestling with for quite some time:

Anne Applebaum is an American political journalist living in Poland whose columns appear weekly in The Washington Post and on Slate. Her views are pro-free-trade and generally hawkish. A Thatcherite in the 1980s, and a supporter of Obama for president in 2008, Applebaum is stoutly pro-immigration, pro-intellectual and anti-torture. Last year Foreign Policy magazine declared her one of “the world’s most sophisticated thinkers.” In awarding the 2004 prize for general nonfiction to her book “Gulag: A History,” the Pulitzer committee called it a “landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.”

But what does the analog world know? Online, readers see Applebaum and her work quite differently. To read The Washington Post’s comments section is to discover an outraged throng that insists she knows absolutely nothing. Not long ago, a poster named jbburrows pronounced Applebaum a “liberal fool.” Respondus described her as “a lapsed neo-con addict.” Lloyd667 on Slate wrote, “Anne gets just about everything wrong.”

Just about everything.

This is something I’ve wondered about for a while: Why are the comments on my sole-proprietor, no-budget, stitched-together, lame-o blog so wonderful, and those on professionally done, big-budget, well-respected sites so terrible? I’ve referred in the past to the Free Press Klavern, the slavering, anonymous, brain-free troupe of readers who feel obligated to chime in on every Detroit story and turn it racial. Let’s just go over there and see…

OK. Here’s a feel-good story about one of the city’s most prominent businessmen, who’s married to a younger woman (not under nefarious circumstances; he was a widower). She’s expecting twins. Let’s just fish one out of the hat:

Are they really his? I guess we will have to see what they look like.

And so on. Big media companies go to great, painstaking lengths to make themselves “diverse” inside and out, and Gannett probably goes the furthest — they were the company that decreed from on high that reporters must seek out non-white sources on all stories. (Which spawned some of the great inside-baseball media stories, which we can all tell one of these days after it sinks beneath the waves.) I can’t imagine being a black reporter or editor, working hard on a story, and having this stuff attached to it like a hemorrhoid. (It’s not just race that excites the yahoos, but that’s topic No. 1.)

I’ve heard different things about Gannett comment threads, but all via grapevines, nothing official. The gist is that they purposely keep their hands off, for legal reasons — if you moderate, you’re responsible for what appears there, but if you don’t, you’re not, so the explanation goes. It makes no sense to me, but then, I’m not a lawyer.

It’s the anonymity that brings out the beast in people, of course. Take away the name, and people feel free to say any damn thing that bubbles out of their id. I don’t except myself, either — I’ve been an anonymous blog commenter in the past, and while I don’t do it anymore, I will say that it served its purpose. But most people who comment here are anonymous or at least somewhat shrouded — I know Coozledad’s real name, and it is neither Coozle, nor Dad — but we generally keep things decent and respectful.

Maybe it’s the anonymity, plus the size of the net cast. When you’re one of thousands reading a MSM website, it just seems easier to spew. I don’t know. I do know I’m grateful to you folks for being the fabulous community you are, from sea to shining sea and then to a few more seas (hello, Copenhagen!). Don’t ever change, or if you do, just get funnier and smarter.

Russian-study time. Have a great day.