Why Charles Arthur Should Read Things Before Slagging Them Off
Yesterday, my friend Shane Richmond sent me a draft of a blog post to comment on as he does from time to time. I thought it was excellent. Later, he published it on his Telegraph blog. It’s about how David Simon, creator of The Wire is an ‘amateur’ TV producer, in the sense that he didn’t train or do formal study to be one, and how he should be more willing to accept amateur journalism as a result. Simon writes about his early, somewhat fumbling, TV experiences on Homicide: Life on the Street at some length in a note in the UK edition of his brilliant book Homicide (which I reviewed on 26 Books last year).
Shane’s post got tweeted around on Twitter quite a bit and then, a few hours late to the party, super-troll Charles Arthur – technology editor at the Guardian – chipped in with what seemed to be a total misreading of Shane’s post.
Now, of course, David Simon is, in the strictest sense, a professional TV producer, which is to say that he gets paid to do it. But in another sense, he is indeed an ‘amateur’. Shane spells out what he means by using that word about half-way through his post:
But what puzzles me is Simon’s antipathy to the notion of amateur journalists. After all, he’s an amateur television producer. He wasn’t trained in the medium, didn’t work his way up from being a tea boy. Nor did his co-writer and co-producer Ed Burns. Burns was a policeman and teacher. Together they used their experience to craft a television show which explored the worlds in which they had worked. Their backgrounds were far more important than their training in the medium.
Here’s the timeline as far as I can reconstruct it (Twitter post times are adjusted for BST – the API reports them at GMT + 0, while BST is GMT + 1).
- 12:51: Shane publishes the post
- 21:21: Charles responds to someone retweeting it: “if @shanerichmond doesn’t know that David Simon has done utterly amazing journalism in his books, it’s his loss, not Simon’s.” – original tweet.
- 21:23 Shane replies: “@charlesarthur You haven’t read the post have you? – original tweet.
- 22:19 Tim Duckett says : “@shanerichmond @charlesarthur You two aren’t at it again are you? Do we have to send you both up to bed early?” – original tweet
- 22:21 Astonishingly, Charles reveals that he hasn’t actually read Shane’s post despite the fact that the original tweet he responded to contained a link to it. – “@shanerichmond send me a url, I’ll read it.” – original tweet.
- 22:38 Charles finally gets around to reading the post he’s been slagging off, and tweets the first part of his response: “Calling David Simon an “amateur” producer shows an astonishing ignorance of his earlier TV work, eg. Homicide; The Corner….” – original tweet.
- 22:39 Quickly followed by the second part: “…and on other points, the arguments aren’t complete. Is free is the best model, why don’t free papers suck up all adverts from paid ones?” – original tweet.
- Friday, 11:00 Charles responds to MJDodd (note that here, Charles has silently withdrawn his original accusation that Shane said David Simon was an amateur journalist, which was before he’d read Shane’s post): “@MJDodd yes, calling David Simon on The Wire an “amateur producer” indicates a quite astonishing level of lack of research.” – original tweet.
Before I get into this further, I have some interests to declare. A couple of weeks ago, I got so annoyed at the way Charles was gloating over the Telegraph’s embarrassment over their Twitterfall experiment that I tweeted the following:
I’m astonished at the arrogance, hubris, and all-round cuntishness of Guardian journalists. @charlesarthur, for instance.
That tweet was picked up by Private Eye and erroneously attributed to the Telegraph’s Assistant Editor, Justin Williams. If you want a full run-down of the argument between Shane and Charles, have a look at Malcom Coles’ post That Shane Richmond / Charles Arthur Twackdown in full…
Another interest to declare. The Telegraph was a client of the web agency I used to work for; we built their blogging platform for them. Later I did some contracting for them. On the other hand, I loathe the Telegraph’s politics and am a regular Guardian reader.
And one final interest. I’m close friends with Shane. I first met him in January 2006. He wasted no time in telling me that The Wire was the best show on TV and got me hooked on it there and then. Since then we have watched episodes of The Wire together, listened to podcasts about it in the car and talked about it almost every time we see each other. He’s also urged me to watch Simon’s earlier series for HBO, The Corner (I haven’t done so yet). We also watched several episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street together, finding it very disappointing and only a pale shadow of his later work, although to be fair, Simon didn’t have any real say in how the show was made. So, while I’m naturally sympathetic to Shane’s argument because he’s my friend, I also know how deeply he has thought about The Wire. Anyone who has read his blog knows how long he’s been making the opposite case to David Simon on newspapers – I’m not going to go into that side of his argument here.
If you want more than my word for how much research Shane has done into The Wire and David Simon’s career, then let me point you in the direction of a few of his posts and articles.
First of all is this article from the Telegraph of 22nd May 2007 (which, according to this post is almost a year before Charles even started watching the show). Shane’s article contains one of my favourite quotes about The Wire:
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love The Wire and those who haven’t seen it. Yet.
Then there’s his review of Raphael Alvarez’s The Wire, Truth be Told over on 26 Books from June 2007.
It’s also worth checking out Shane’s post on David Simon’s the ‘bible’ for the first season of The Wire.
I think that takes care of Charles’s claim that Shane’s research is faulty.
Now let’s look at Charles’s objection to Shane’s use of the word ‘amateur’. As Shane spells out in the paragraph I quoted above, and the fact that he placed the word ‘amateur’ in quotes in the title of his post, he’s not using the word literally. He understands that Simon gets paid for his work. He understands and acknowledges that he is supremely good at being a TV producer. He says in his Telegraph article that The Wire is the best show ever on TV, so we can assume that he thinks he’s better than all of the professional – i.e. career – TV producers out there.
Clearly, Shane uses the word ‘amateur’ in its original French sense. As Wikipedia puts it:
Translated from its French origin to the English “lover of”, the term “amateur” reflects a voluntary motivation to work as a result of personal passion for a particular activity. Among the thousands of amateurs who have made important contributions to science and technology are Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, and Gregor Mendel.
Edison, Darwin and Mendel are exalted company indeed. Describing someone as an amateur in the sense that Shane does is the exact opposite of an insult. It’s the highest compliment you can pay. Simon makes shows like The Wire because of his passion. Getting paid is a bonus.
Charles has form in confusing the meanings of words in the heat of an argument. During the Twackdown, he seemed unable to accept that he’d misused the word “eavesdrop”. Characteristic of the troll, he aggressively suggests that Shane doesn’t understand the meaning of the word – “Buy a bigger dictionary” – before later making the lame excuse that he was a bit tired in a comment on the Twackdown post.
When David Simon says that The Wire would be “something that Euripides might recgonise” you can trust that he’s actually read Euripides. Not so with Charles Arthur when he slags off a post. You also can’t expect Charles to accept when he’s wrong, unlike Shane. When challenged, Charles just ups the trolling ante.
It’s legitimate to take issue with Shane’s argument about the future of newspapers – assuming you’ve actually read the post of course – but you can’t accuse him of a lack of research or ignorance about David Simon’s work both in print and on TV, or that he misused the word ‘amateur’. I hope Charles will accept that and apologise. Maybe he should also consider reading things before slagging them off.
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18 Responses to “Why Charles Arthur Should Read Things Before Slagging Them Off”
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I think Shane has risen above it now. I queried them as to whether to expect Twackdown 2:
@shanerichmond @charlesarthur should I be preparing for Twackdown 2?!?
http://twitter.com/malcolmcoles/status/1731106701
@shanerichmond @charlesarthur I am humming eye of the Twiger (yes, I know that was Twambo 3, not 2)
http://twitter.com/malcolmcoles/status/1731168160
but no reply from Shane (wise man) and only this from Charles who also no longer seems to be spoiling for a fight:
@malcolmcoles might be a long wait, but you never know.
http://twitter.com/charlesarthur/statuses/1731193349
A pity: it’s very enjoyable to watch from a safe distance.
Be that as it may, Mr. Richmond’s original comparison between David Simon’s previous training before making the wire and the hobbyist nature of all unpaid “citizen journalists” is ridiculously, regardless of the catfight you describe above. Nowhere in Simon’s testimony does he make mention that anyone need go to journalism school, only that they be a paid and trained professional and that they engage in covering an institution on a full-time basis. That comports exactly with Simon’s degree of experience before making The Wire. He had apprenticed on Homicide, first as a staffwriter, then story editor, then producer. Indeed, he often credits Tom Fontana with teaching him everything he knew about television production to that point. Then he had coproduced a miniseries for HBO, and then finally, The Wire.
He committed to all on a fulltime basis and was recompensed for his efforts, meaning he didn’t need to do other things to make a living. That — and only that is what Simon said. Anything more and Mr. Richmond is putting words in Simon’s mouth. Simon’s fundamental point about what parttime citizen bloggers can and can’t accomplish that professional beat reporters can is untouched by Mr. Richmond despite all of the semantic equivocation.
David Simon seems to believe that the best way forward for journalism is something that can’t possibly happen. He makes the mistake of forgetting that the _customers_ don’t actually want the reporting he lauds so highly. If they prized it so highly, why did every single paper in the world stop doing this kind of reporting?
Look back through Shane’s blog over the years, and you’ll see that he recognises the need for someone to have a ‘beat’ – for example Rich Waghorn’s coverage of Norwich City Football Club. Although – fair enough – Rick was a professional journalist before he started MyFootballWriter.
There are plenty of people who are writing for blogs for free in a professional environment – I used to be one of them at the Telegraph. I wrote posts for them, sent them to an editorial desk and waited for them to be published. Some weren’t, for a variety of reasons. I wasn’t paid for my work. I know that there are other people – much bigger names than me – who are doing similar things.
This is part of the ‘amateurishness’ that Shane is referring to. I haven’t had any training in writing since I left school (in 1988). He’s saying that the people with the stories are not necessarily the journalists. The people who have the stories are now capable of writing them themselves, without the intermediary of the press.
Here’s a great example. A lady called Tracy Stent, a QPR fan, went to virtually every day of a multi-week trial a few years ago and recored it almost verbatim in a massive PDF document. It’s *easily* the most detailed coverage about that trial. The mainstream media only cared about two par stories – which were mostly inaccurate – while Tracy captured hundreds of pages of detail.
Under David Simon’s scheme, there should be some QPR court reporter for every national daily, just waiting to bang out a story like this. It’s lunacy. It’s the kind of thing that simply _didn’t happen_ before blogging. Shane’s point is that this type of writing has the power to provide the kind of in depth reporting that Simon says he wants. So why is he so averse to it?
The internet is an unfortunate blind spot in David Simon’s otherwise fascinating world-view. He claims that putting your content on the web for free is the clearest way of showing contempt for it. Which is, for all my sympathy with his work and admiration for his passion, a total misunderstanding of the web and of the possibilities for journalism for the future.
@higgis: [Simon]“makes the mistake of forgetting that the _customers_ don’t actually want the reporting he lauds so highly. If they prized it so highly, why did every single paper in the world stop doing this kind of reporting?”
Surely that’s answered in Simon’s testimony, which you’ve read. Out-of-town organisations which preened on prizes and wanted bigger profit margins bought the smaller papers that had been happy with 10-12% margins, and pushed for 20-25-30% margins. To do that, they cut costs. Which meant reporters. The Baltimore Sun was cutting back well before the internet was hurting the business.
Why? By Simon’s testimony, because of that disconnection with the local readers.
You might think that Simon is enormously wrong (clearly, you do) but it’s interesting to note that there are other people in the business world who think the same way. It might be desperate self-preservation, Canute-style. But as I’ve blogged (personal blog) just because an important story is there to be told, that doesn’t mean it will get told, or even researched. Do not make the category error of thinking that how you think is how everyone thinks. Instead, observe what actually happens. It’s more like what Simon describes than the happy examples you offer, I think.
@charles I don’t think Simon does address that point in a logically consistent way. If there is an unsatisfied demand for that type of reporting, then surely someone will enter the market and fill it. If the demand exists and hasn’t been ignored by the existing organisations, why has no one else come in to satisfy the demand.
My view – while trying to avoid a category error and assuming others think as I do – is that the reason no one has filled the void is because there’s not enough money in it. Obviously there’s a conflict of interest between a free press and government subsidy. Or you could argue that the demand _is_ being satisfied by bloggers., which is what I think Shane means.
It might surprise you to find that I do disagree with Shane in some respects on the future of newspapers – for example on his recent Kindle post. But I think he makes a case that deserves to be taken more seriously than erecting straw man positions that he didn’t take and then knocking them down again as you did last night (see the timeline reconstruction above).
Will you apologise for implying that he said Simon was an amateur journalist as you did in your tweet last night? Without pretending that it’s his fault you didn’t read the post? I think you should.
As I say, your disagreement on the substance of the argument is entirely legitimate: it’s the inaccurate quoting and dismissal of the argument without having read it that prompted me to write the post in the first place. As I said in my post, it wasn’t my intention to get into the debate on the future of newspapers. If you want my view on that, for the very little that it’s worth, you can try my earlier post on how the newspaper industry is like the soviet union – http://bit.ly/FV0b8
Re: my happy examples. A couple of months ago I attended an event (with Shane) at BestBefore.tv – makers of AudioBoo – which featured several (horrible neologism) “hyperlocal” bloggers. I was greatly encouraged that there are people who care passionately about their local community and are using the new tools that the internet gives them to bring what they know and find out to that local audience. But I agree that there are lots of reasons for pessimism. I just don’t think that having eloquent and noteworthy people like David Simon going around trashing the one medium that could provide the answer is terribly helpful. Rupert Murdoch and David Simon are very strange bedfellows.
For someone prepared to think the unthinkable on drugs, as David Simon is, I find it very strange that he’s unable to see the potential of the internet – surely as a tech blogger you must find that strange. As Shane said to me the other day, “it seems like [David Simon's] in a much better position to effect change than almost anyone else. He could create exactly the kind of news source he describes for Baltimore if he wanted to”. Why *doesn’t* he do that, I wonder?
Because of the price of entry. Having a blog doesn’t mean it’ll be read.
The tweet I was responding to, Twitter-style, was Lance Knobel who offered the title of Shane Richmond’s post: “If ‘amateurs’ like David Simon can make The Wire, why can’t they do journalism? :: Shane Richmond” and its link (http://twitter.com/lknobel/status/1729798318). Did I read the post first? No. Clearly, an error; but the headline misled me into my reaction, which is what you start your timeline with there. I thought it was calling Simon an amateur in journalism, lumping him into the “they”.
I’ll leave it to others to judge if that was a stupid or a natural error.
As to whose fault it is.. well, you’d have to ask him, but Shane Richmond vanished from my Twitter feed after that last set of disagreements, and it wasn’t me who removed him. My feeling is that he blocked me, which seems an odd reaction if he truly had the best of the argument. Twitter doesn’t give you any way to know if someone has blocked you. Over to you – do a bit of journalism on the side.
Why doesn’t Simon create the news source for Baltimore? Hmm. You’ve seen Series 5: the disconnection between what happens and gets written in the newsroom, and what is really happening on the streets and in the police halls, is so complete that you can’t believe they’re the same planets. Maybe he sees no way but the hardest grind to get to the real stories. Who’s going to blog from the corner of Monroe and Fayette (or its successor)? Who knows?
Sure, I’m a tech blogger, but I’m also a realist, and a pragmatist, and a sceptic. Yes, I’d like everything to happen wonderfully. But I’ve also observed that good intentions run aground on the realities of time, money and outside pressures. That’s why I don’t dismiss what Simon has to say. The answer doesn’t lie in absolutes. It lies in what can actually be made to work.
@Charles Thanks for your comment, and sorry that it got stuck in the Akimet mesh of death.
The price of entry wouldn’t be too high for, say, Rupert Murdoch or some other newspaper tycoon. Where’s Charles Foster Kane when you need him?
My feelings on Season 5 are rather skewed because I feel David Simon went too far in his sympathy for the newsroom worker and made his plot rather lacking in credibility, especially the McNulty/Lester story-line. I’m trying not to spoil things for friends of mine who haven’t seen it, so I’ll leave it there.
I agree completely that a pragmatic response is what’s needed. That’s what I think is missing from David Simon’s analysis. He’s building castles in the air, it seems to me.
I asked Shane whether he blocked you and he told me that he did – having lost patience with your consistent refusal to argue on what he actually wrote rather than what you assumed he’d written. That’s what the point of my post was. In my opinion, it’s incumbent upon you to give him the respect of reading what he has to say before disagreeing with it – inaccurately – so publicly. Especially if you’re going to get on your high horse about journalistic standards. Twitter or no Twitter, there’s no excuse for misrepresenting someone else’s argument. In the case of an honest mistake, an apology is called for.
You then compounded the error by accusing Shane of an “astonishing lack of research”, which I think I’ve shown is also untrue.
Natural error or not (what’s an unnatural error?), I think it would conclusively prove me wrong in accusing you of being a “super-troll” if you apologised for the initial mistake and for saying that his research was faulty. As I’ve said repeatedly, the substance of Shane’s argument with David Simon was not the subject of my post.
Ah me.
So that solves that. If you look at that Twackdown thing, though, I don’t think I was refusing to argue about what he wrote. My last question to him was to ask whether he thought the #budget Twitterfall experiment was a success or a failure. He didn’t answer. Apparently that was the final straw. Wow.
Now, that’s a bit of a “have you stopped beating your wife?” sort of ultimatum. “I’ll stop calling you a super-troll, which is a label that I’ve personally created and hung on you, if you’ll admit an error I’ve imputed to you.” If you look at my original tweet, I said that “If [emphasis added] he doesn’t know…” There’s no error in there. There’s an implied question for someone to pick up and refute or confirm.
You’re saying he does know. Well, I’ll take your word on it – though he seems to be innocent of the depths of the books of Homicide and The Corner, and I don’t know if he’s seen the series of Homicide:Life On The Streets (which I was watching back in 1997 – see this alt.tv.homicide link.
Was I wrong in thinking he didn’t know about Simon’s detailed work on The Corner, Homicide: Life On The Streets and so on before The Wire? Errr… there’s no reference to those series, or Simon’s role, in his post. There’s no reference to Simon’s two books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets or The Corner (the latter with Ed Burns).
That’s sliding past Simon’s very substantial TV experience to imply that he sprang from nowhere to co-write/produce the best TV series EVAH isn’t it?
But – boring. Deconstructing tweets in this way is tedious. The debate should be about where journalism goes, how it can thrive, and so on, not what the headline on a blogpost is or precisely what the writer of that blogpost knows but didn’t include.
Find a clearer error for me to apologise to and I’ll be happy to do so. But there are errors and omissions aplenty all around here, it seems to me.
Amazing.
If I tweeted: “if Robert sucks the devil’s cock, that’s the devil’s loss not Robert’s” are you really saying that I’m not somehow snidely accusing Robert of fellating Satan? You made an error – which you actually admitted in an earlier comment. Just apologise and move on.
All this matters (and it may be boring, but a lot of what matters is) because you’re a journalist and your apparent inability to read something and respond to the specific points it raises rather than the ones you choose from limited or no exposure to the material goes to your credibility as a journalist. If you’re that sloppy and arrogant on Twitter, how can we take anything you report at face value?
Further, this means that your qualifications to play Sancho to David Simon’s Quixote are also called into question, since it is good journalism – which I understand to be reporting based on facts – that he is crying out for. Good journalism includes – presumably – not mischaracterising someone else’s position, not least a fellow professional.
It also makes your employers look bad because you appear to be slagging off anything the Telegraph does simply because they are doing it.
The reference to the Twackdown is to establish a pattern. Here it is:
1 – Slag something off without bothering to give it much thought.
2 – Repeat the misquote/misunderstanding with variation and add some condescension
3 – Engage in a ridiculous semantic argument as if we were in court to try to wriggle out of what you said in the first place (’eavesdropping’, ‘if’)
4 – You come under pressure and realise you’re looking a bit silly
5 – Claim that this isn’t the point – it’s boring – a misunderstanding – everyone else is making mistakes, so why shouldn’t I?
That’s the exact same pattern with this case. And, in my view, is also the classic behaviour of a troll.
You’ve done it again with this post. Twice. First you accuse me of not revealing my friendship with Shane up front – which I clearly did. Fair enough: you apologised for that. But is the irony of misunderstanding the first sentence of a post accusing you of not reading things carefully enough lost on you?
You snidely (although deniably) imply that I hadn’t read David Simon’s evidence (quote: “Surely that’s answered in Simon’s testimony, which you’ve read”). Which is breathtaking considering that you’re pointing that out as a potential flaw of mine – and I had read it, incidentally – when that’s exactly what you did initially when responding to the tweet erroneously.
Now you ask whether Shane has watched Homicide: Life on the Street (it’s a singular Street – not ‘Streets’ – in that title, another misreading, and not a one off: I’ve seen you make that mistake before). I say that we watched it together in this very post.
You accused him of a lack of research, and yet you are guilty of exactly that yourself. You didn’t research Shane’s other writing – which would have revealed the depth of his knowledge. You could have asked if if he had seen those other series and read those books before accusing him of not doing so. That’s what a good journalist would have done, no?
Maybe Shane should have mentioned that he’d seen all of these programmes and read all of these books – but he’d just be repeating himself, as anyone who researched it a bit would see, and as I showed in this post. A blog shouldn’t be footnoted like an academic treatise should it?
I’ll say it one more time. My post is not about the substantive points of Shane’s post or David Simon’s evidence or your or my opinion about any of that. It’s about getting you to see that you treated Shane very unfairly on Twitter and to, hopefully, persuade you to find the good grace to admit it, apologise and forget all about it. I really hope you’ll do that.
Charles, I blocked you on Thursday evening after your “if he doesn’t know that that’s his loss” tweet because I don’t want to get sucked into further arguments with you.
Homer Bigart: You’ve taken a tiny piece of what I wrote and from there misrepresented the whole. My point was not specifically about Simon’s background but about how he created The Wire. I explained that he came to TV from journalism, that Ed Burns had been a teacher and policeman. Then I pointed out that they used writers whose had never written for TV before and cast actors who had never acted at all, even on an amateur basis.
I concluded by asking: “Why is he so closed to the possibility of a new kind of journalism being built in a similar way?”
In other words, why can’t David Simon conceive of amateur journalists playing a role alongside professionals?
If you read his testimony, it’s clear that he thinks there is no room for bloggers to act as journalists. It’s not that he thinks they can’t do it on a fulltime basis, he doesn’t believe they can do it at all. He credits bloggers with “little more than repetition, commentary and froth”.
That, it seems to me, is his “fundamental point about what parttime citizen bloggers can and can’t accomplish that professional beat reporters can”. I addressed that point by linking to this excellent Gawker post – http://gawker.com/5243523/david-simon-dead+wrong-dinosaur – which gave considerable evidence undermining Simon’s position.
Then I asked why, given his own experience, Simon was unable to see a way forward.
Shane:
That’s intriguing, because on the day after we’d had our back-and-forth about Twitterfall – which is a long time before last Thursday evening – I found that I wasn’t getting your updates any more, and doesfollow.com said to my surprise – that you weren’t following me, and I wasn’t following you.
Yet all my other Twitter feeds were still in place and I hadn’t changed anything. The only explanation I could think of was that you had blocked me then. An alternative explanation would be that Twitter had had a random spasm and unfollowed each of us from the other, but that seemed so randomly specific I couldn’t give it credit.
Are you quite sure about the timing of your decision?
(I’ll deal with other points in a later comment.)
@higgis:
OK, then. My original tweet wasn’t based on reading the post. I worked off the headline, which was a mistake. Unfortunately, I feel the headline reflects the post, and that the post is wrong in its description. I thought Shane meant David Simon was an amateur journalist; instead he was suggesting that Simon is an “amateur” TV producer. If that’s the case, as I’ll show, Shane is an amateur journalist. I don’t think either is true.
Meatier topic. Here’s why: because Twitter isn’t my journalism. It’s where I interact with people, gather knowledge, perhaps put out some personal opinion (even the uninformed, kneejerk variety, which I’ll then retract if it’s wrong), have a greater interactive reach than other ways.
It’s not my journalistic output, in other words. For my journalism, I take a lot of trouble. Such as, a couple of weeks ago, trying to remember which episode of the Wire has a photocopier used as a “lie detector”, and finding the video so I could find out if the cue cards say FALSE or LIE, because I wanted to use it in a comment piece. Unimportant to the general thrust of the piece, but important to get right.
But my tweet was, as your timing shows, not during my normal office hours; it isn’t an official account; and it was just a reaction to the headline. It was me being a person, rather than me engaged in the official journalism I’m paid for at The Guardian. If people think I’m wrong they can engage me in debate. Hey, look, that happened!
We’ll come to Shane’s piece in a moment.
That’s a misrepresentation. I’ve given the Telegraph credit for good stuff it’s done, such as the MPs’ expenses stuff, and pointed out when Justin Williams of the Tele got it right about swine flu and I didn’t. See my Twitter feed for examples.
Being off-duty, and not expecting any meaty story to emerge, I took off my journalism hat and I skim-read your post. As I linked above, I was watching H:LOTStreet in 1997 or so, and I read the book H:AYOTKStreets more recently. So I’ve mixed it up sometimes. In work for high-profile publication as part of journalistic endeavour, I’d check ahead of publication and those errors would, one hopes, get caught. Sorry for being imperfect.
OK, then. Let’s go to Shane’s post:
And also from Shane Richmond’s post: “He [Simon] stopped working in newspapers before I started ”
Assuming that Wikipedia is correct on this detail, “Simon left his job with the Baltimore Sun in 1995 to work full time on Homicide: Life on the Street during the production of the show’s fourth season.”
OK. So who’s the amateur then? The person who worked in newspapers for a dozen years, and then has been working in TV scripts and production for 13-14 years? The characterisation of Simon as an “amateur television producer” is simply wrong on its face. He’s spent more than half his career in and around TV. Simon has more time in TV than Richmond has in newspapers. If that’s amateur.. then so is Shane an amateur journalist, with his (full-time, I assume) job at a large media organisation. Doesn’t quite work for me.
Back to you.
How about if it’s hyperlinked to show that when he’s talking about “amateurs” he is actually referring to someone who has been professionally engaged? What if he mentioned Simon’s other work – the other TV series, the two books? He doesn’t link to them or to Simon’s career bio.
I was wrong to react only to the headline. The amazing thing though is that on examining Shane’s post, it’s shot through with precisely the weaknesses that I reacted to in the headline. The link to Gawker criticising Simon? Read the comments. It’s full of people who offer counter-examples, who point out that just because you get some people going to county meetings in Santa Barbara doesn’t mean you’ll get them on Monroe and Fayette in Baltimore. That’s a parallel weakness: to think that because the blog post says something, that the comments don’t matter. The Gawker comments are intriguing and important.
Shane says of Simon “He doesn’t understand the internet…. Why is he so closed to the possibility of a new kind of journalism being built in a similar way?”
Seems to me he understands it perfectly well; but he doesn’t wear rose-tinted glasses about its potential. He simply observes what is happening now in the areas he cares about. The mark of a journalist, maybe.
Interesting. I thought I’d blocked you after the Twitterfall disagreement and yet there was your tweet appearing in my stream on Thursday. I guess I blocked you and then changed my mind. Whatever, when I checked on Thursday I wasn’t blocking you and now I am. As I say, I really have no interest in further ‘debates’ with you.
Charles:
You say that your Twitter account is a personal one, and yet your bio calls for people to submit stories to you as Technology Editor of the Guardian:
If I say in my bio – as I do – that I’m a programmer and then make an embarrassing error about programming when I’m off duty, I’d still expect that error to diminish whatever standing other programmers hold me in.
I don’t know about others, but I certainly have less respect for your journalism as a result of the way you’ve behaved over this. And, as I say, I’m sympathetic to the Guardian and its politics. Of course, I’m not in any way trying to suggest that my view counts for others. I wouldn’t want you to accuse me of another ‘category error’.
I can only conclude that it must be a deliberate and, by now, bloody-minded refusal to accept the definition of the word ‘amateur’ in the sense that Shane used it – unless you want to dispute the definition I quoted from Wikipedia, which is unquestionably the sense in which Shane used it.
It’s not the length of David Simon’s service that determines whether Shane’s usage of the word is fair or not. It’s the fact that it was a second career, almost stumbled into. He didn’t write Homicide or The Corner (the books) to get a TV show, but to tell a story he was passionate about and that he felt needed to be told. The TV came about as a result of that, not as a deliberate career move, so far as I understand it.
In that same sense, I’m an amateur programmer. I haven’t ever had any formal training: I’m completely self-taught. Many of the people I work with a much younger than me and have the benefit of a Computer Science degree or similar. They’re not necessarily better programmers, although of course some of them are (damn them).
I’d be happy to accept that I’m an amateur programmer, despite the fact that it’s a job I’ve done for 18 years – the entirety of my working life (unless you count that pizza delivery job as a music student). Although, clearly, I wouldn’t want to put myself in the same category as Darwin, Edison, Mendel or David Simon.
Charles, I can see that you’re not going to accept that you were unfair to Shane. I think that’s very unfortunate. I don’t have the energy to carry this on, picking over the minutiae of things said in haste as though they were carefully considered. I think by the letter of what you said and, far more important, by the spirit of it, you have wronged Shane and should admit it – that would in no way weaken your argument with him on Simon’s position vis-à-vis the internet and newspapers.
Since it seems likely that you won’t accept that, I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.
I would however, like to apologise for nitpicking over the plural on the word ’streets’. That was petty and snide. No excuses.
@higgis
I find this Humpty-Dumptyism exhausting. My dictionary has “amateur” as “a person who engages in a pursuit, esp. a sport, on an unpaid basis; a person considered contemptibly inept at a particular activity – ‘that bunch of stumbling amateurs’.” Not nth-century French; 20/21st century English. There’s no reference in the blog post to “I’m using this in its original French meaning of the enthusiast who becomes expert, in the manner of Darwin”. Perhaps I missed a hyperlink somewhere.
Is that bloody-minded of me? Well, it’s asking that if you’re using a word in a very particular one of its meanings, that you at least make that clear from the outset.
I was wrong to think, based on its headline, that the post was calling Simon an amateur (in its modern, 21st-century sense) journalist. My tweet was written, as many are, in haste. It was just wrong. The intent was not to insult; my intended tone was more sorrow than anger , because those two books Simon produced are incredible, inspiring pieces of work. Once I’d read the post, I cleaved to the point which I’ve maintained since about its description of ‘amateurism’ and how applicable that is to David Simon.
Then I respectfully request that you engage with the work I do as journalism, and judge and criticise that on its merits, and decide whether it satisfies you.
So then, in your literal reading, we’re forced to conclude that you think Shane doesn’t know that David Simon got paid for being a TV producer, or that his work on The Wire was “contemptibly inept”. We can’t draw the latter conclusion because the first sentence of Shane’s post is
Since you can’t possibly think that Shane does imagine Simon went unpaid, and the quote marks around the word can’t have gone unnoticed, we’re still left with your bloody-mindedness.