As the man who created The Wire, the best television show I have ever watched, David Simon has my undying affection and respect.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

The Guardian’s Technology editor. Posting the news, chasing the news on Apple, Google etc. What you got?

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.

You made an error – which you actually admitted in an earlier comment. Just apologise and move on.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

It also makes your employers look bad because you appear to be slagging off anything the Telegraph does simply because they are doing it.

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.

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.

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.

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?

OK, then. Let’s go to Shane’s 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.

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.

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?

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’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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.