Hank Stuever’s last in-house Washington Post critique

America’s only pink paper (no, seriously), the New York Observer had this bit on Washington Post Style section reporter Hank Stuever going a wee bit further during his turn in the daily-critique-by-a-staffer thing than the big brass may have intended:

This forum seems to have a lot of focus-group fallout, calling for: shorter stories, faster formats, oh my it’s all too much to handle, I can’t possibly read it all, I don’t know where to start, I get everything I need from my (pet electronic doodad). And, my favorite, from a critique a couple of days ago, the assistant news editor guy who reads the NYT, WSJ (so navigable! Huh?), then gets online and reads everything else, and then and only then might deign to read The Post, which is, again, too this and too that and is an incredible intrusion on his time. Remarkably, the paychecks navigate their way to his bank account every other Friday, which is another way for me to say that I firmly, firmly believe that if you can be bothered to work here, you can bother to read this paper – the meatspace version, not the Web, the printed result that we all worked so hard to make — every day before you read someone else’s. This is why I can never be allowed to observe focus groups: I will surely bust through that one-way glass window and administer hard spankings to each and every participant who seems incapable of just paging through a newspaper, looking at headlines and pictures, and deciding whether or not there’s something worth stopping on.

I think we’ve overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn’t include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Then again, no one is interested in my new slogan for The Post: “News Flash: Everything’s Not Always About You.”

OK, that’s probably all funnier to me than it is to some of you, but I’m laughing here. And, frankly, Stuever nails a lot of the stuff that’s wrong with the reader survey results and (to an even greater extent) what the newspaper consultants have been pushing recently.

(Source.)

(Tell me why) I Don’t Like Mondays

Monday is always a quiet-yet-awful day of the week, since the paper is off to print at the Daily Press and it’s time to start thinking about next week. On some weeks, like when there’s both a city council and a school board meeting, both of which almost inevitably produce one or more stories, that’s pretty easy. On other weeks, like this one, there’s no meetings scheduled, no major events scheduled, nothing. So it all has to come from me. I’m not one of those writers naturally afflicted by a fear of the blank page — my home computer is filled with the equivalent of a million pieces of paper full of ideas, phrases, paragraphs, the first line of my novel, and so on — but on weeks like these, I can get a glimpse of the abyss those writers stare into, and feel staring back at them.

OK, that’s not true; there is one story that looks like a 50/50 chance of being in next week’s paper. It’s perhaps the most depressing subject of all time, but a story that needs to be covered, if it doesn’t resolve itself on its own.

In the meantime, I need to come up with some ideas, and fast. This is the glamorous life of the writer.

Dave Cusick’s Post Modern Rock Show

I’m so senile (already — I must have caught it from the cat) that I can’t remember how I heard of Dave Cusick’s Post Modern Rock Show, but I’m glad I did. I’m not 100 percent sure how he can manage to play actual full songs in a podcast without being killed by rights issues, but I’m enjoying it while I can. A great, great radio show, available via podcast, for download or for live streaming over the Internet. Like all amateur podcasts, it has more talk than I’d like, but Dave is fortunately relatively interesting and even when he’s not, he’s pleasant enough. And the music more than makes up for the delays.

Good stuff. Check it out.

World of Geekcraft

Every time I think I’m a giant World of Warcraft geek (although, to be fair, I should get a bye on being called a geek for this, since my name is in the credits, somewhat inexplicably), someone comes along and shows me what real geekery looks like. If nothing else, pick something better to cook than Westfall Stew. Beer Basted Boar Ribs, for instance, aren’t geeky at all, yum.

I am also not geeky enough (or, probably, not young enough), to have the least bit of interest in the World of Warcraft collectable card game. In fact, I’m old enough to view the merger of baseball/collector cards with playing cards with vague suspicion. (Of course, if the in-game goodies are really cool, all bets are off.)

I am, however, geeky enough to seriously consider going to BlizzCon in Anaheim. Of course, I’d be compelled to wear my Warcraft III launch shirt given to Blizzard staff when the game hit shelves back in 2002 or my World of Warcraft shirt we wore to E3 for the newly announced game and sow misinformation.

OK, maybe not. We’ll see.

Liz Phair podcast

At long last, it’s here. Copy this URL into your podcasting software of choice, or just save this file to hear Liz Phair’s podcast.