Something very unfortunate happened in the Chicago blogosphere late last week. A popular blogger on ChicagoNow wrote an injudicious blog post, the leader of a major Chicago weekly took very personal–and very public–exception to said blog post, and ultimately, ChicagoNow took the blog post down. Except it wasn’t as cut and dried as all that, and after a weekend of thinking about it I still have no clear answer. But one thing is for sure: things got really ugly.

Last Thursday  Tuesday, Arresting Tales blogger “Joe the Cop” wrote a blog post describing a “Ghetto Shooting Template,” based on his experience as a Chicagoland police officer. In the scenario, a black man with an arrest record is shot and killed by police, witnesses come forward but refuse to divulge what they know, and the family of the deceased files a civil lawsuit. According to Joe, all of that happens again and again in Chicago and even a casual reader of the major dailies would find it hard to argue with the pattern. But Joe did three objectionable things in the eyes of a lot of people. He used the word “ghetto.” (Hurray for a word that isn’t politically correct.) He cited police statistics to point out that 75% of Chicago murder victims and murder offenders are black men. (Hard to argue with official records.)

And…he said of an actual repeat offender shot and killed by police that he would probably be worth more to his family dead, as the subject of a civil lawsuit, than alive. And whether that’s true, it’s a pretty callous thing to say about a recently deceased person whose loved ones might read your words. And they did read, and comment angrily. And so did Time Out Chicago (TOC) editor-in-chief Frank Sennett. Over the course of the week Joe was called a racist for his words. Sennett took to Twitter–were he proceeded to write around one-hundred critical tweets–and on Thursday took to the TOC Blog, in both places lambasting Joe and ChicagoNow and labeling Joe a racist.

I talked to Joe at the ChicagoNow tweetup on Thursday evening and he seemed taken aback at the idea that merely pointing out statistics and observing a verifiable trend would be cause to call anyone a racist. I happen to agree. I don’t even think Joe’s callous words merit a charge of racism. That’s such a kitchen-sink word liberal-minded detractors like to throw about when they don’t like someone telling things as they are.

But just because Sennett and his fellow critics were confusing racism with bad judgment, that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a point. I don’t know whether Joe got their point Thursday night, and even if he did, I don’t know that there was any cause for him to delete his post. In fact, Joe wrote a rebuttal post that night, explaining why he said what he said, in great detail. You can find that post (for now) in the Google cache here. Unfortunately, you can’t find it anywhere else, because over the weekend ChicagoNow decided to take down both Joe’s original post and his follow-up.

ChicagoNow had a point in doing so. They promulgate Terms of Use to all bloggers and reserve the right to take down posts that violate those terms. In general, controversially opinionated posts are okay. But posts that create unnecessary discord are not. From ChicagoNow’s viewpoint, I assume causing needless pain to the family of a man who’s just been killed was the catalyst for deleting the posts. While I don’t agree with their removal, I can understand the reasoning behind doing so which was explained on the Chicago Now Staff Blog.

What I can’t understand, though, is why the leader of a major Chicago weekly decided to set himself up as the Internet police, harass ChicagoNow through an unnecessary stream of angry tweets, champion Internet censorship, and then take credit for doing all of that in the online pages of TOC. Sennett swears he’s not a censor, yet he makes it clear he’s angry Joe still has a position as a ChicagoNow blogger.

Here’s the deal. Take it from a former Internet bully. Regular readers of this blog know that in the past I’ve been highly ad hominem and unfair towards other people because I didn’t agree with their opinions. Though I’ve spent a lot of time lately atoning for acting that way, the fact is I did and though I’m ashamed of my past actions, I won’t deny them. In fact, more than once Sennett, himself, took me to task publicly, on Twitter, for being an Internet bully. So why did Sennett decide to make himself into just that–an Internet bully–last week?

I’ll tell you from deep personal experience, when you’re really angry, and you have an axe to grind, and you have a public pulpit, it can be intoxicating to go on the attack and it can be very hard to realize how you’re coming across to other people, or that you’re even being unfair at all. I really hope that’s the explanation for Sennett’s actions, because I think harassing a colleague publication and a rank-and-file blogger in the way Sennett did last week is just not becoming of the editor-in-chief of a prominent Chicago weekly.

What’s more, just because Sennett decided he was the Internet police, ChicagoNow didn’t have to agree with him. I respect their decision and reasoning for taking down Joe’s posts. (And if you’ve been with me awhile, as you might imagine I’m letting go of past criticisms because it’s just not my job to try and “fix” ChicagoNow, and I’ve made my amends for personal attacks made in February.) But I can’t help but see it as self-censorship on a platform that hangs its hat on being a home to open debate. Couldn’t ChicagoNow have worked all of this out in the relevant comment threads, in a follow-up post, or perhaps even in a special community forum or live discussion on the issue? That’s how controversies of all sorts are generally worked out on the blogosphere. It’s very rare a post actually gets pulled. (For example, in the five years I’ve written Chicago Carless, I’ve pulled down a grand total of one post, and that’s out of more than 600.)

At this point, I think it’s very much to ChicagoNow’s credit that they’ve left up posts by other CN bloggers who have protested the deletion of Joe’s posts. Dissenting posts have come from very popular blogs, too, including District 299, A League of Her Own (which quotes a lengthier explanation from CN staff), and Chicago Muckrakers (which reposts some of Sennett’s tweets.) ChicagoNow should leave these posts up to underscore that open, unfettered community debate is still alive and well in its virtual pages. In fact, I think the best thing to do would be to republish Joe’s original posts. As the Google cache demonstrates, it isn’t as if they’re not still out there.

As for Joe, himself, I don’t think he needs to do much more than keep being honest and open about his words and motives–as he very much was in his follow-up post–except maybe to think a little more about the compassion quotient in his posts. Next time he names names on his blog or anywhere else, it would help to try and put himself in the other person’s shoes first, to get some perspective on how he may be coming across to others. Take it from me.

You too, Frank.

]]> http://www.chicagocarless.com/2010/09/27/chicagonow-you-see-it-now-you-dont/feed/ 0 http://www.chicagocarless.com/2010/07/23/the-archives-will-remain-online-the-troubling-history-of-geoff-dougherty/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-archives-will-remain-online-the-troubling-history-of-geoff-dougherty http://www.chicagocarless.com/2010/07/23/the-archives-will-remain-online-the-troubling-history-of-geoff-dougherty/#comments Sat, 24 Jul 2010 01:05:27 +0000 Mike Doyle http://www.chicagocarless.com/?p=3694

UPDATE 2/1/11: Welcome to readers from Robert Feder’s TOC Blog. Six months ago in this post I suggested that Geoff Dougherty being hired by the Chicago Reader reflected a total lack of bothering to check his tumultuous backstory in local media. Now, a week after his sudden departure from the weekly, it’s hard to decide who has more egg on their face–Dougherty, who should be used to it by now–or the powers that be at the Reader…

In a surprise move, the Chicago Reader has named media entrepreneur Geoff Dougherty as its new associate publisher. Considering his less-than-stellar history finishing the news ventures he starts in the Windy City, one has to wonder about the Reader’s motives here.

Reader scribe Michael Miner announced the appointment on his blog yesterday, a hire decided by Marty Petty, CEO of the Tampa-based chain of urban weeklies, Creative Loafing, in a meeting that also saw interim publisher Alison Draper assume the publishing mantle officially. Draper, herself, created controversy last month by firing popular, longtime Reader editor Alison True, citing a “leadership issue.”

But if leadership is what Petty and Draper are after, one wonders where the evidence of it is in Dougherty’s spotty track record. Dougherty seems really good at launching big ideas–but pretty awful at following through on them as promised. As Miner points out today (and Poynter Online’s Jim Romenesko quotes), Dougherty, “famously asserted at the Chicago Journalism Town Hall early last year that for $2 million a year he could cover Chicago as well as the Sun-Times or Tribune.” So why did his only two major ventures, the online Chi-town Daily News and the print/online hybrid Chicago Current, both suddenly close up shop?

History suggests it’s because Dougherty is much better at getting initial investors to buy into lofty ideas about citizen journalism than he his at actually making those ideas work well enough to make additional investment seem worthwhile.

In December 2005, Dougherty launched the online Chi-Town Daily News as a nonprofit venture to mobilize citizen journalists to cover local stories in the wake of the dissolution of the Tribune-owned City News Service. That aim was invigorated in 2007 when Dougherty received a $340,000 Knight News Challenge grant to train 75 citizen journalists and forge a grassroots news network replicable in other cities.

Two years later, with a skeleton staff and no such citywide network ever created, Chi-town Daily shuts its doors after experiencing an approximately $700,000 shortfall for 2008–the year immediately following the Knight grant. In a Crain’s Chicago Business story that reported the shortfall, Dougherty blamed the money woes on the lagging economy, saying: “This year due to the economic downturn, it was unclear whether we would be able to maintain that level of revenue.” Later on the Chi-town Daily website, however, Dougherty recanted, instead blaming “Foundations and major donors in Chicago [who] have, for the most part, failed to support our work, as have local corporate sponsors.”

Dougherty also said he was giving the citizen-journalist training program over to Loyola University, but “until that process is complete, the website will remain online, updated with content from our volunteer reporters.” It’s unclear how much of a program Dougherty ever managed to create or what Loyola eventually did with it, and new posts on the website ceased shortly after Dougherty’s announcement.

At the time, I partly agreed with Dougherty, having just blogged about the danger of over-reliance on foundation funding. In a heated comment thread on Chicago headline discussion site Windy Citizen, others questioned whether Dougherty’s original idea could ever have attracted additional funding, much less reached sustainability. There was also consternation concerning the way Dougherty had treated paid staff, including lack of payment for staff journalists during Chi-town Daily’s final days. One former staffer in particular, Fernando Diaz (@thefuturewasnow), now the managing editor of Spanish-language daily, Hoy, posted a pointed criticism of Dougherty’s leadership and business practices on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow blog network, saying in part:

“Dougherty’s inability to accept help from these hungry reporters who believed and still believe in the importance of journalism, admit when he was wrong and delegate the basics of running a business simply caught up to him.”

But Chi-town Daily News was not the end of Dougherty’s forays into the local news space. Shortly after its failure, Dougherty announced the launch of Chicago Current, a news venture covering Chicago city politics aimed at paid subscribers, seemingly on the model of Rich Miller’s successful, state politics-oriented Capitol Fax. However, whereas Miller distributed his paid content in a low-cost manner via fax and password-protected website posts, Dougherty and unnamed “angel investors” (the most substantial of whom was rumored to be his uncle) sought to distribute their paid content as a much costlier glossy, printed newsletter to be mailed to subscribers, with free content available on the website.

Media watchers almost immediately criticized the idea (see Windy Citizen comment threads here and here), wondering among other things:

• Why Dougherty would choose such a high-cost method of distribution instead of following Rich Miller’s low-cost lead;
• How a mailed political newsletter could effectively cover real-time City Hall issues better than the major dailies;
• For that matter, how the Chicago Current could successfully compete over the long-term with the growing Chicago News Cooperative; and
• Whether Dougherty could rebuild sufficient trust among former Chi-town Daily journalists, local reporting experts in their own regard, to bring any of them aboard.

The back-channel answer to the last question was a resounding ‘No’ from a few noted former staffers. (No LMGTFY here, but it’s pretty easy to figure out who came and who didn’t on your own.) The answers to the other questions seem indirectly to have been provided by Dougherty, himself, who suddenly jumped ship from the Chicago Current yesterday to join the staff of the Reader–putting at least one local journalist out of work two consecutive times by Dougherty’s hand. (Again, LMGTFY.)

In Dougherty’s latest goodbye message, posted this time on the Chicago Current website, he announces his new job and laments:

“Though this is an exciting opportunity, it also means the end of the Chicago Current. I clearly can’t serve both organizations at the same time, so the Current will cease operations effective immediately. The Current’s archives will remain available online.”

Sound familiar?

From all of the above, if there’s evidence of Dougherty’s abilities to make a news venture financially viable, make friends with potential investors, follow through on promised strategy, understand the importance of electronic content delivery, or motivate staff, it’s hard to discern. What a track record like this seems more likely to suggest is that someone shouldn’t be in the news business in the first place.

It would take an enormous leap of faith to think that Petty and Draper don’t already know all of Dougherty’s backstory. If they don’t, they haven’t been paying attention–and that alone would speak volumes about the potential for the Reader’s new keepers to ever adequately support investigative journalism at the weekly. It could be they want Dougherty for his ability to be a big thinker. Or for his connections, however self-damaged, in community news circles.

Or maybe Petty and Draper just need a young, warm warm body in place to flip the Reader in a quick sale to another investor from beyond Chicago who fails to do their homework.

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It wasn’t the first time, nor has it been the last, that local mediaphiles have taken me to task for questioning the lockstep status quo that sometimes seems to define the Windy City’s deeply intertwined blogging/reporting/PR fishbowl. (See posts here, here, here, here, and most recently, here, and additional comment threads here, here, and here.)

Admittedly, I can be a firestorm in and of myself. No one ever needs to wonder where they stand with me, or where I stand on an issue. That clearly is the New Yorker in me, and it’s a nature borne of a previous life spent in a city where fishbowls of every sort tend to be transparent. Whether you’re writing about politics, the press, local nonprofits, or anything else, everyone there has an opinion that they’re willing to share, and no institution or official gets a pass on explaining their actions and the motives behind them.

That, of course, is the opposite of the way things work in Chicago. We elect politicians–and their children–for life in this town and county. We don’t talk back to our elders–or our foundation funders. And we certainly don’t question whether The Powers That Be could perhaps, just a little, Be doing things a little bit better. That’s just the way it’s always been. It Is Written.

And that’s where many Chicago locals leave it. Turn off the ol’ brain, let the neurons fire down, keep a low profile and let the way things are stay that way. Or else you’ll be cleaning your alley and dragging your trash to the dump on your own. And, of course, as is the multiple mantra of many similarly fearful Chicagoans, “You’ll never work in this town again/get another contract again/get anything moved through city council again.”

There’s truth in all of this. From Daley pere through Daley fils, city administrations have never taken well to disagreeing subjects citizens. And I’ve been in more than my share of PR meetings watching nonprofits and community groups speak of local grant funders in the same tones of fear, reverence, and fealty ordinarily reserved for God. Or the mayor, for that matter.

It’s all a great setup for keeping people in their place and keeping things keeping on exactly as they are. It’s a terrible state of affairs if, however, things aren’t as good as they could be, because without dissent there’s no viable way to make change happen. In systems like Chicago’s, people don’t just refrain from rocking the boat, they do their best to keep anyone else from rocking it either, to make sure they don’t get collaterally splashed by the damaging waters of a funding cut-off or a municipal blacklisting.

I have personal experience in this regard. There is a specific local nonprofit I used to champion (and who just last year championed me) whose own powers that be avoid me now because I had the audacity to question the grant decisions of one of their funders. (See: fear of collateral damage.)

And that’s fine. In the end, as a blogger, a Chicagoan, and a human being, I don’t owe allegiance to anyone else’s funders, nor to the public officials from whom they may be seeking approval or the blog networks with whom they may be partnered. I take my cues from my sense of what is fair and what is not. If some others think concepts like fairness, or justice, or (oftentimes in Chicago) honesty are less important than keeping themselves clouted, so be it.

But it sure would be a lot easier to make change happen in Chicago if the knee-jerk reaction even from the people who might benefit from such change wasn’t so often, “We know, but please keep your voice down.” It’s a little like the  “If you don’t like it, leave!” that some particularly mindless Chicagoans spout whenever anyone not born in a local area code dares to suggest things could be better here.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had bloggers, reporters, and nonprofit professionals tell me they wish they had the courage to publicly take some of the same stands I’ve taken here on Chicago Carless, say some of the same things I’ve said about local funders, or local officials, or local blog networks. Even if I could count them, I couldn’t tell you who they are. But there have been many.

If ever they all decide to tell their funders, officials, and readers what they actually think about things instead of just quietly telling me and each other all the time, Chicago’s media space would be a lot more transparent. But knowing this landscape like I do, I fear that would be expecting too much from it.

And who really wants thirty-foot weeds in their back alley, anyway?

(Photo: Macy’s State Street July 4th flag. Credit: jodola.)

You can’t run a 21st-century blog network at the speed of a 19th-century newspaper. I wish someone would tell the Chicago Tribune. Yesterday, when I ended my ten-month run as the scribe of the Chicagosphere online-media blog for the paper’s ChicagoNow content network, I was still waiting for the roll-out of site improvements promised on Day One. I was far from the only blogger dissatisfied with the paper’s glacial responsiveness. Eventually I realized why: ChicagoNow is a blog platform that simply wasn’t designed with bloggers in mind.

What other explanation can there be for a network of more than a hundred blogs that makes it hard for visitors to find and explore those blogs? Over the past ten months, I lost track of how many times friends and readers told me how inscrutable they found navigation on ChicagoNow.

If there’s one fundamental principle of website design, it’s this: don’t make me think. It’s decade-old advice that cautions designers not to cause viewers to puzzle their way through a website. Why? Because if you make it difficult they don’t find what they’re looking for, they leave, and they don’t come back. Before you can think about sexy things like SEO and PageRank, you have to make sure your visitors don’t get lost. Well-designed blogs have concise navigation bars and obvious ways to access past content. On the best blogs, you can tell at a glance and without furrowing your brow how to find what you need.

That’s exactly how ChicagoNow doesn’t work.

For months, ChicagoNow staff have crowed about a few superstar blogs on the network that generate hundreds of thousands of page views a month. That’s a neat trick–but you generally have to be a sports or pop-culture blogger to pull it off in the absence of an industry-standard navigation scheme. Most CN bloggers, however, write in topic areas that don’t as easily lend themselves to a cultural common denominator. Without an easy-to-understand, easy-to-use site design, it’s hard for visitors to find blog sites and remain loyal to them. And visitor loyalty is especially important because ChicagoNow bloggers are only compensated for local page views in the Chicago DMA and nowhere else.

Unfortunately, instead of relying on accepted standards, for ten months ChicagoNow’s online environment has felt more like Fisher Price Playskool for bloggers. That’s pretty insulting–not to mention limiting–for ChicagoNow bloggers who’ve come to rely on standard environments and tools from years of producing blogs for themselves and others. It’s an outright disservice to newbie bloggers who end up thrown into the shallow end of the pool, made to use clunky online tools and suffer through ineffective navigation that they might easily assume are somehow common.

Since the network’s May 2009 inception, many bloggers have contacted ChicagoNow staff seeking a change for the better. Here are a few of the things ChicagoNow bloggers have been asking for:

• Top-level categories that make sense so that blogs can be found by occasional ChicagoNow visitors;
• Industry-standard navbars and sidebars that offer easy and obvious access to category and date archives so that people stick around and browse;
• Date archives that don’t expire (mine did, for months), pushing your oldest content into obscurity; and
• Vanity URLs to help bloggers effectively promote their sites instead of being saddled with a URL that has 25 extra characters in it.

Bloggers have also been asking for something more: responsiveness. In the ten months I blogged for ChicagoNow, rarely was an issue investigated in a timely manner. The blogopshere measures timely in minutes. Unfortunately, the Tribune measures it in days.

Not that the paper was always slow to act. Frequently, inadequately strategized ideas were rolled out across the network on a moment’s notice. In one particularly impactful example, last summer a TweetMeme button was installed on all ChicagoNow blogs. Developers didn’t ask bloggers for their personal Twitter details first. Instead, they left TweetMeme’s default settings unaltered. As a result, thousands of retweets of ChicagoNow articles went out across Twitter that all pointed back to TweetMeme’s corporate account instead of the Twitter accounts of the bloggers who had written the retweeted posts, eliminating any possibility for bloggers to build new social-media relationships with readers.

I was responsible for pointing out the problem to ChicagoNow staff. Unfortunately, although the TweetMeme rollout took place in a morning, it took days to actually fix the problem. The delay was caused by ChicagoNow’s contracted developers being beholden to other clients. Making matters worse, after the problem was fixed, every time a global site rebuild took place, TweetMeme would revert to the default settings once again.

Why wouldn’t professional developers know how to configure a common blog widget like TweetMeme? And why wouldn’t the Chicago Tribune pay for its developers to be on call for a project the size of ChicagoNow, anyway?

There could be one good answer to both of these questions and this debacle started me pondering it: perhaps TweetMeme, like ChicagoNow, itself, was rolled out simply as a way to generate page hits and ad revenue for the Tribune, alone. Perhaps the needs of ChicagoNow bloggers were simply not taken into account at all? That would certainly explain ten months of blogger requests and complaints largely falling on deaf ears.

This January, after a year of hand-wringing for all parties, ChicagoNow began culling underperforming blogs. Given the still-underperforming state of site navigation, I shudder to think how many blogs that might be. For me, that meant my minimum compensation agreement was canceled. Several bloggers with ChicagoNow from the beginning, myself included, originally requested a compensation base in order to make writing for the new blog platform worthwhile. We were repeatedly assured by ChicagoNow staff that forthcoming improvements to site navigation and the strength of the Tribune’s existing web traffic would conspire to improve the visibility and popularity of our sites.

Of course, neither of those things ever happened. As a result, my site–and I suspect many others–was never able to attract much readership. For my entire ten months writing for Chicago Now, visitor traffic to my personal blog, Chicago Carless, consistently exceeded the meagre daily numbers of Chicagosphere. I eventually stopped complaining, since everytime I begged for ChicagoNow to have its developers implement industry-standard navigation, I was just told to try harder, as if good writing and focused SEO can make up for a lack of a useful navigation strategy.

In the end I was offered the same rate as other bloggers: $5 per 1,000 local page views. Curiously, many of my ChicagoNow posts generated healthy national page views. That’s no help in the Tribune’s financial worldview. Although most bloggers would benefit from the platform-enhancing exposure of a national readership, the Trib makes its money from local ad revenue. Instead, ChicagoNow’s compensation scheme is aimed at disincentivizing national readership. In essence, the Tribune demands that its bloggers ignore the growth potential of their own brands while expecting them to help bolster the Trib’s brand.

No blogger should ever be asked to enter into a lopsided businesses relationship like that. As part of my exit strategy, I’ve decided to reprint my Chicagosphere entries (for which I hold copyright) here on my personal blog, Chicago Carless–a platform with a built-in readership beyond Chicago.

I leave ChicagoNow grateful for the opportunity to widen public awareness about my writing, but disappointed at the the network’s unrealized potential. More than anything, I’m left wondering: who woke up one day and decided to create a blog platform seemingly designed to make it as hard as possible to be an effective blogger?

From my experience, I find it hard to believe that advice was sought from a single blogger in Chicago or anywhere else during the design phase of ChicagoNow. Any blogger with an ounce of good sense easily would have clued into the project’s glaring lack of effective navigation, and running the site by the blogging community could have staved off a lot of the bumps and bruises ChicagoNow scribes have suffered over the past ten months.

[Ed. Note: After this post went live this morning, I heard from a noted local new-media professional who told me he attended a pre-launch strategy meeting between ChicagoNow and local bloggers at which he and several others warned ChicagoNow staff about the need for better navigation. He said they were politely ignored.]

Because the Tribune did not do so suggests that ChicagoNow was never the “community blogging project” it purported to be. What seems more likely is that the Tribune, in yet another example of journalistic hubris, decided to try and corral local bloggers together to use as a revenue engine in support of a push into the online sphere. Bloggers were told that by allying with ChicagoNow they would reap the benefits of a fertile online platform with a limitless ability to grow. In reality, they just ended up pulling the plow.

I don’t think the needs of bloggers were ever truly considered when ChicagoNow was originally planned out. I don’t think they have been taken seriously in the months since the network debuted. And I fear they never will be.

Now that the culling has started, ChicagoNow staff say they’re moving away from a niche blogging strategy and towards a “community news” model, creating new neighborhood blogs to provide more “granular” local news. I wish those new bloggers luck. If the Tribune weren’t trying to re-invent the blogosphere wheel yet again, the paper might take might notice of the already successful experience of the Seattle Times. The Emerald City paper identified and partnered with existing and already well-read neighborhood blogs to accomplish the same, granular aim. The partnerships are working, and the Times heavily promotes the third-party community news content on its home page.

I doubt the Trib’s newsroom would ever allow bloggers to be taken seriously like that in Chicago. In fact, reporter reticence may explain the whole bloggers-be-damned blogging strategy in the first place. During my ten months blogging for ChicagoNow, the distinction between “hobbyist” bloggers and “professional” journalists was always underscored, generally by the journalists, themselves.

In one particularly brutal example of this, when I disagreed with Trib architecture critic Blair Kamin in an early blog post, he responded by:

• writing a three-page angry letter to ChicagoNow management;
• yelling at me over the phone for 10 minutes;
• telling me it wasn’t my place to speak to him because it wastes his time when he’s not dealing directly with editors;
• telling me it wasn’t my place to disagree with him because his Pulitzer Prize and years of architectural criticism elevate his opinions above those of rank-and-file Chicagoans;
• saying that I didn’t “have the right” to disagree with newsroom staff, anyway, since my check was coming from the Tribune;
• demanding that I edit my blog post to his liking; and
• demanding that I take dictation of his verbal edits over the phone.

And if you think I’m kidding, I took notes during Kamin’s animated and highly disrespectful tour-de-farce–for which he never apologized–to make sure I remembered it all. In the end, Kamin didn’t get his way, but it’s safe to assume he’s not the only asshole in the newsroom. Shortly after the debut of ChicagoNow’s Division and Rush satirical illustrated blog about the Drew Peterson murder case, blogger Todd Allen received a series of obscene comments from an I.P. address traced directly to Tribune Tower.

At any rate, instead of following the proven methods of the Seattle Times, and in deference to the Tribune’s fore-described internal Luddites, once again ChicagoNow’s blogosphere strategy waves in the wind, cut off from pre-existing good sense. What an unfortunate, but entirely deliberate mess.

The blog post you’re reading isn’t the first time a ChicagoNow blogger–much less this former ChicagoNow blogger–has voiced every single one of these issues. Staffers involved with the project at all levels, from ChicagoNow’s own community managers on up to executive management at the Tribune, have consistently heard these complaints from bloggers since ChicagoNow rolled out last May.

In all that time, the only consistent response to blogger complaints has been a physical one. I really think there must be a chiropractor on retainer at Tribune Tower. I don’t know how ChicagoNow staff would have made it through the past ten months of repetitive shrugging without one. Most of all, I don’t know how they expect their new strategy to work any better than their old one without finally putting a good navigation scheme in place.

But what do I know? I’m just a blogger.

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The de facto discussion thread for this post with over 260 comments and growing is occurring on the Windy Citizen. It is now the top-rated, busiest discussion ever to happen there. I invite you to follow the link to read what dozens of Chicago bloggers and old- and new-media insiders are saying about the points I raised regarding ChicagoNow. Before you go, if you like what you found here, please consider subscribing to my feed. And thank you for reading.

As major Chicago media increasingly search for inroads into community news on the Internet, some existing sites are doing a good job of covering neighborhood-level news all on their own, especially on the South Side.  One of the them is the Southwest Observer, which I told you about back in October. Another such great, granular news site is the University of Chicago-based Chicago Weekly–an alternative weekly taking on the responsibility of keeping the Presidential first-neighborhood informed.

Earlier this winter, I spoke with Chicago Weekly editor-in-chief Sam Feldman about the publication’s desire to be the primary community news source for Hyde Park. According to Feldman, it’s curiosity that’s driving the paper’s ambitions.

“The University of Chicago already has a paper, the Maroon, that comes out twice weekly and covers only the campus,” says Feldman. “But I see journalism as just about the best possible way to get to know a place. I think almost everyone on our staff is here because they want to dig deeper into the neighborhoods around us and really find out where it is that we live.”

Helping make that happen, the Chicago Weekly covers news stories not only from the local neighborhood but drawn from around the South Side in general. A weekly print (yep, print) edition is distributed in and around Hyde Park and mirrored online, and a daily blog picks up news items that arise between print editions.

All of that is a neat trick since the University of Chicago doesn’t have a journalism program. It’s not a problem says Feldman. “We’ve been trying to develop our own journalism skills,” he tells me. “The Weekly (hosts) a series of workshops every Friday afternoon on various topics like reporting, interviewing, and arts writing, and we’re trying to provide more opportunities for experienced editors to mentor new writers one-on-one.”

Those writers include students, alumni, and people unaffiliated with the University, and according to Feldman, the Weekly is always looking for new voices. Together they produce a magazine-style publication that includes narrative journalism and first-person stories and, unlike last-century’s journalistic paradigm, allows for the sharing of opinion and subjective perspective–as long as it’s accompanied by a reasoned analysis.

The Weekly’s covered a lot of ground already. “We’ve posted on World Music Festival events on the South Side, a Masonic temple listed as endangered by Landmarks Illinois, a map of South Side jazz clubs from 1925-1940, and the ‘Autumnal Slowterium’ slow bike ride,” says Feldman. “We hope to keep posting on interesting, quirky, and important news from around the South Side.”

At the end of every winter, the Chicago Weekly chooses a new editor who in turn chooses a new editorial tree. Here’s wishing those incoming staffers continued success as an independent online source of community news.

(Image: If something like the above lives in your closet, do I have a meetup for you…)

This week, Windy Citizen editor & publisher Brad Flora (@bradflora) had a great idea–ask a group of local bloggers to throw their names behind a community Christmas party for our readers. It’s an all-inclusive community holiday meetup–and if you’re reading this post, you’re invited!

The party is free. The drinks are not, though there will be specials. The theme is deliberately tacky–we’re asking you to wear the ugliest Christmas (or other holiday) sweater you can find. But don’t let good taste stop you from coming, either. Dress as the holiday spirit moves you, but we hope to see you there!

Full details are below. Feel free to bring your friends. For further updates, you can browse the main party page on Windy Citizen or follow the official party Twitter hastag, #chisweaterbash.

WHAT:
The Chicago Ugly Christmas Sweater Party

WHEN:
Thursday, December 10th, 2009, from 7:00 p.m. to whenever

WHERE:
Black Rock Bar, 3614 N. Damen Avenue, Chicago, IL (see map)
CTA: Brown Line to Addison, then walk two blocks west

Sponsored by these Chicago hometown blogs:

• Windy Citizen
• Outside the Loop Radio
• Chicago Carless
• Chicagosphere
• Lake Effect News
• Chicago Foodies
• The Urbanophile
• Backgarage
• Driftglass
• Windy City Wine Guy
• Fun Sherpa
• Chicago Bar Project
• Making Chicago Home
• Sound Citizen
• Loud Loop Press
• Chicago Tumbls Too
• Chicago Dining Examiner
• Gals Guide
• Windy City Watch
• ChiTown Tattler

(Graphic: The many faces of Bill Leff…)

Update, 12/5/11: Every time Bill Leff gets a new gig, this post gets new page views. This is why they tell you to think before you speak, folks. The Internet has a very long memory…

______

“Here’s a lesson to you from the media. Focus right now if you want us to promote you. Because you are replaceable.”

Those were the words spoken to me by Bill Leff, host of WGN-AM’s ChicagoNow Radio. It was a minute before air time this morning, and Leff was exasperated that I didn’t have a set list of topics I wanted to talk about. Or something like that. I’m really not sure, and I didn’t stick around to ask. I said, “Okay,” got up, and walked out of the studio.

I’ve blogged about journalistic hubris several times here on Carless, not to mention on Chicagosphere, the ChicagoNow blog I had been booked on ChicagoNow Radio to promote. It’s one thing to write about it. It’s quite another when it’s sniping at you from the other side of a control panel.

Before Leff made it clear I wasn’t welcome there, I was really excited to be on the show. Leff’s producers had spent the past couple of days in email and on the phone–and the previous 15 minutes in person–prepping me. They offered me lots of helpful tidbits.

Among the prep from Leff’s producers: “Don’t worry about our usual 10-question interview;” “Own the room and make the interview your own;” “Have fun with it;” “Have a sense of humor;” “Let the subjects just flow;” and “talk freely” about a variety of topics that could have but didn’t need to include the Oak Park penis logo controversy, the Mac migration debate here on Chicago Carless, and what it’s like to be a New Yorker in Chicago.

My big mistake was thinking Leff had any idea what his staff had told me. Or any respect for me as a blogger, for that matter. It didn’t take long for him to make his feelings known, however. As soon as I sat down in the studio, directly next to an executive managerial staffer from ChicagoNow, Leff began hounding me for a list of topics I intended to cover. Of course, I didn’t have one–his staff told me not to worry about it. So I played it off. Making matters worse–for Leff–my ADHD brain became happily distracted by listeners on the sidewalk beyond the studio glass who were trying to get a plug on the air.

The ChicagoNow staffer next to me was trying to “communicate” with them through the glass along with me. Leff, however, would have none of it. He glared at me, stormed away to the other side of the table, and said to me, in front of ChicagoNow and WGN staff, the quote that opened this blog post.

Maybe Robert Feder was right? The erstwhile Sun-Times TV columnist made one of his first posts as a blogger for New Media radio station Vocalo a criticism of the potential for the ChicagoNow Radio show to be worthwhile. Lord knows, it wasn’t for me.

Too bad. I had been really excited to be on the show. So excited that when Leff’s producer asked me at the last minute to show up half an hour early because Garrard McClendon, the original 11:30 a.m. guest, was stuck in traffic, I canceled breakfast, left my boyfriend behind in my apartment almost in mid-sentence, and ran to Tribune Tower from my home office in Marina City.

For any traditional media person to believe it’s their duty to give a longtime blogger a “lesson from the media,” much less warn them that they’re “replaceable”–and thus better be duly grateful for the opportunity for the coverage–is laughable. I could tell Leff that I’ve been writing words for the blogosphere and doing media relations for more than a decade. Or I could remind him–and you–of his own recent, very public replacement from WLS-AM earlier this year. I could have done that last bit on air, too.

Instead, I took a page from NYPD Blue’s James McDaniel, who famously walked out of the Regis & Kathie Lee green room in the mid-90s after Gifford attacked his show shortly before he was scheduled to go on. I guess Leff didn’t expect me to stand up for myself as literally as I did. Shortly thereafter, his producer was texting me an apology and I was finishing my Thanksgiving shopping.

The funniest thing about all of this, is Leff–a stand-up comedian and film major with no traditional journalism training whatsoever telling anyone it was time for a lesson from the media.

Here’s a lesson for Bill Leff: I am as much a part of the highly interactive media scene in 2009 as you are. My blog readership on Chicago Carless (my flagship byline), my Twitter following, and my Facebook friends will not dip because I did not do your show. My readers will not abandon me en masse because I chose to walk out of the WGN studio.

In fact, my audience numbers probably wouldn’t have grown appreciably from doing Leff’s show, if at all. Unless Leff’s listeners decided to stop what they were doing (most likely, driving), get a pen and paper or pull out their smart phones, and write down/navigate to one of my blog URLs, I doubt my audience stats would have much noticed that I had even done the radio show.

Unless you’re an A-List media name brand, bloggers get their traffic from other bloggers. Links and love from elsewhere on the Internet and from various social media platforms build blog traffic a lot quicker than going outside the Internet ecosystem to talk about the fun we’re having here in the virtual realm on a broadcast show–or on a printed page–where it takes several additional steps to make it back to http land.

My audience members, potential and future, are already on this side of things. They’re here on the Interwebs. I don’t need to reach for them over the airwaves. And as a rule, I seldom do. Leff’s crew asked me to bring my party to WGN this morning, against my better judgment. So why on earth would he think he was doing me a favor?

Everyone has a bad day. I’ve spent most of my day trying to figure out why Leff would say something like that to me.