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I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Monday, May 12, 2003
L'affaire Blair
Not surprisingly, my journalism school class e-mail list was abuzz today about Jayson Blair, serial fabulist and column inch-filler at the New York Times. One very prominent colleague went so far as to claim a previous relationship with Blair at another newspaper, during which he had been asked for -- and provided -- a "roadmap" for how Blair could get a job at the esteemed NYT (presumably a less convoluted cartographical device than the one currently being wanly waved at Israel). When we pressed him further on the nature of this roadmap, our friend refused to divulge a word until someone promised him a byline for his scoop. There is honor among thieves, but not, it would seem, among journalists.
We're all byline hungry, we hacks. I think this is what caused Blair's penchant for plagiarism. See, what interests me most about the disgraced reporter, when trying to suss out his motives, is his age: 27. That's the same age Stephen Glass was five years ago, back when he ripped a hole in the New Republic's credibility with his own admission of creative writing (with perfect timing, Glass is releasing his first novel this month). And it's roughly the same age Janet Cooke was in 1981, when she fabricated her resume, walked into the Washington Post's newsroom and made up the Pulitzer prize-winning tale of an eight-year-old heroin addict. Do we sense a pattern here?
There is a funny kind of pressure some of us late twentysomethings -- the type A's -- put on ourselves. We peer into the future and see the time-consuming task of raising children taking us from here to the end; the cradle, then the grave. If we're going to make our mark in our chosen profession, we think, the time is now. We become unusually hungry for respect and adulation. It gets personal. Stephen Glass said he confused people liking his stories with liking him. And how many of us can honestly say we haven't invented ourselves a little? Embellished our cocktail party anecdotes? Plagiarized a bon mot or two?
True, there's a huge difference between what we say in casual banter and what we write on the front page of the New York Times. But the Blair case is only shocking because of the august publication his roadmap took him to. If he had made up quotes for, say, the National Enquirer, or the Weekly World News, or for that matter most of the British tabloids, he would not be the talk show topic du jour. And whom do these publications rely on? Who stokes their engine rooms? That's right: byline-hungry hacks in their late twenties and early thirties. You've got to watch us. Ambition, attitude and active imagination make us dangerous.
I suppose this is the point where I make my own full disclosure: I have never fabricated a quote in a published story, nor have I plagiarized, nor pretended to be at the scene of a story by taking details from a photograph, as Blair did (which sounds like way too much work; why not just go there?). But I'm not so proud or morally arrogant as to believe I would never have done these things, had things worked out differently. After all, I did cut my journalistic teeth at those British tabs. At J-school, I was voted most likely to edit the National Enquirer. If I worked for a publication with a pressure-cooker environment and a tradition of subtle fakery; if I hadn't had such good friends, lovers and mentors ... well, I could easily have been among the legions of cases worse than Blair's. The hacks with no reality check. The ones who never get caught.
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