Butter Side Down . . .
Jason Fry |
Nov. 2, 2009 8:01 a.m.
The Web is a wonderful invention, allowing us to reach a potentially global audience, interact with readers in real time, and use hyperlinks and graphics to deliver a wealth of information and enrich our storytelling.
But not everything about the Web is wonderful – and I’m not talking about the fact that commenters can be savage, attention spans can be short and we can lose the thread of a narrative following hyperlinks and playing with interactive graphics.
Rather, I’m talking about a simple, painful truth about the Web, one I’ve seen firsthand too many times: The toast always lands butter-side down.
Print journalists know their tribal variants on Murphy’s Law all too well, of course. For example, you never leave a note to an editor as plain text, and you never test things with joke copy, because offending copy has a way of tunneling through the safeguards and getting into the paper. Generations of hard experience have taught us this, and every young journalist gets a thrashing for violating such taboos, to ensure it never happens again.
Those print-side warnings apply to the Web as well (buy me a beer and I’ll tell you stories), but online there are other factors that conspire to aim the butter at the carpet. All those eyeballs means mistakes are found and arguments picked apart. The way search results are ranked means criticism builds on itself. And search means that missteps never get buried for those looking for them.
To this, add an element of caprice that just seems unfair … as Murphy’s Law always does.
You can bust your tail writing heartfelt blog post after blog post and carefully constructed column after column. They won’t get the readership or the reaction you think they deserve, and you’ll fume about this, as writers have done since the days in which we wrote in cuneiform and distribution involved clay tablets. But then one day you’ll need to have a blog post or a column, and you’ll be desperate for an idea or just having an off-day. So you’ll get the post or the column out there and walk away in mild annoyance, comforted by the fact that what you wrote is so lackluster that it’s unlikely to connect with anyone and will be ignored. You’ll get ‘em next time. Right?
Wrong. That’s the blog post or column that will get all the comments. That’s the one that will get linked. And if you’re particularly unlucky, that’s the one that will follow you around forever.
Mark Whicker is a veteran sports columnist for the Orange County Register, and a good one – I linked to him a lot during my Daily Fix days. In early September he wrote a column discussing all the things that had happened in sports while Jaycee Dugard was imprisoned in a California backyard. The idea was in poor taste and the execution didn’t help, with the final line (“Congratulations Jaycee. You left the yard.”) seeming to trivialize an unfathomable ordeal.
Whicker was savaged, and quickly apologized. So did his editors, who failed to do their duty and stop him from making the kind of awful mistake every writer makes now and again. But what really grabbed me was something Whicker told Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore in an interview later that week. Back in 1991, he said, he’d written a similar column after the release of journalist Terry Anderson from nearly seven years in captivity in Lebanon — and that column (which sure sounds like a bad idea, too) hadn’t drawn any feedback.
Whicker told Tenore he doubted the Dugard column would have gotten as much attention if not for the “speed of enormity” of the Internet. He’s right, but that’s irrelevant: The rules have changed, as Whicker has learned to his regret. Google “Mark Whicker,” and that unfortunate column is the first result, with reactions to it dominating the first few pages. Whicker’s 22+ years of generally thoughtful, solid work are now buried beneath the weight of one mistake. (I know that I’m not helping.)
I’m not immune — none of us is. Last winter, a strange story made the rounds that Roberto Alomar was being sued by an ex-girlfriend who claimed he insisted on having unprotected sex despite knowing he had full-blown AIDS.
I’ve always disliked Alomar, who seemed to be mailing it in during his time with the Mets, and on Faith and Fear in Flushing I’ve savaged him repeatedly. In the wake of that news, I penned a blog post in which I grappled, fumblingly, with the possibility that he’d been struggling with a horrible disease while playing poorly. What I came up with was an imagined conversation between me and God, in which He takes me to task and makes me admit I don’t really wish terrible things on Alomar. If that doesn’t sound funny, it’s because it isn’t. My stomach felt a little funny, but I published the post anyway, hoping it wouldn’t attract much attention. Within 50 minutes one of our readers ripped me apart in the comments, and deservedly so.
Remember that weird neighborhood play that went the Yankees’ way in Game 2 of the ALCS? In the heat of battle I tweeted “Jerry Layne is a war criminal.” Ugh. If you’re going for raw satire you better be a lot funnier than that, and I soon regretted it. (And I apologize to Jerry Layne.)
I mulled deleting the offending tweet, but that’s a temptation you should avoid — if you try to make something disappear, someone will just dig it out of a Web cache, and you’ll look like a weasel on top of everything else. So ‘fess up and take your lumps. Besides, that tweet was quickly retweeted by a fairly prominent sportswriter (fantastic), so I just put my head down on my desk and thought, “Let that be a lesson.”
So a couple of weeks ago, New York magazine wrote a blog item linking to a Faith and Fear post I’d written explaining why Mets fans should root hard for the Phillies against the Yankees even though the Phils are our current big rival. That was great, and I was very happy – except what was used to demonstrate my Yankee-hater bona fides? The Jerry Layne tweet, of course.
The writer and I are good friends, and he meant me no harm. I don’t blame him a bit. Rather, I blame myself – and the Murphy’s Law of the Web.
If you write a blog, you’re your own editor – if your stomach’s doing flips, wait an hour and take a fresh look at your words. No matter what medium you’re in, entertain the possibility that your editor might be right. Keep in mind that the online audience is potentially huge, and what you write will last forever. And remember: butter side down.
Jason Fry spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy, and is now the Web evangelist for EidosMedia, a maker of editing-and-publishing software for newspapers and other publishers. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.
But not everything about the Web is wonderful – and I’m not talking about the fact that commenters can be savage, attention spans can be short and we can lose the thread of a narrative following hyperlinks and playing with interactive graphics.
Rather, I’m talking about a simple, painful truth about the Web, one I’ve seen firsthand too many times: The toast always lands butter-side down.
Print journalists know their tribal variants on Murphy’s Law all too well, of course. For example, you never leave a note to an editor as plain text, and you never test things with joke copy, because offending copy has a way of tunneling through the safeguards and getting into the paper. Generations of hard experience have taught us this, and every young journalist gets a thrashing for violating such taboos, to ensure it never happens again.
Those print-side warnings apply to the Web as well (buy me a beer and I’ll tell you stories), but online there are other factors that conspire to aim the butter at the carpet. All those eyeballs means mistakes are found and arguments picked apart. The way search results are ranked means criticism builds on itself. And search means that missteps never get buried for those looking for them.
To this, add an element of caprice that just seems unfair … as Murphy’s Law always does.
You can bust your tail writing heartfelt blog post after blog post and carefully constructed column after column. They won’t get the readership or the reaction you think they deserve, and you’ll fume about this, as writers have done since the days in which we wrote in cuneiform and distribution involved clay tablets. But then one day you’ll need to have a blog post or a column, and you’ll be desperate for an idea or just having an off-day. So you’ll get the post or the column out there and walk away in mild annoyance, comforted by the fact that what you wrote is so lackluster that it’s unlikely to connect with anyone and will be ignored. You’ll get ‘em next time. Right?
Wrong. That’s the blog post or column that will get all the comments. That’s the one that will get linked. And if you’re particularly unlucky, that’s the one that will follow you around forever.
Mark Whicker is a veteran sports columnist for the Orange County Register, and a good one – I linked to him a lot during my Daily Fix days. In early September he wrote a column discussing all the things that had happened in sports while Jaycee Dugard was imprisoned in a California backyard. The idea was in poor taste and the execution didn’t help, with the final line (“Congratulations Jaycee. You left the yard.”) seeming to trivialize an unfathomable ordeal.
Whicker was savaged, and quickly apologized. So did his editors, who failed to do their duty and stop him from making the kind of awful mistake every writer makes now and again. But what really grabbed me was something Whicker told Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore in an interview later that week. Back in 1991, he said, he’d written a similar column after the release of journalist Terry Anderson from nearly seven years in captivity in Lebanon — and that column (which sure sounds like a bad idea, too) hadn’t drawn any feedback.
Whicker told Tenore he doubted the Dugard column would have gotten as much attention if not for the “speed of enormity” of the Internet. He’s right, but that’s irrelevant: The rules have changed, as Whicker has learned to his regret. Google “Mark Whicker,” and that unfortunate column is the first result, with reactions to it dominating the first few pages. Whicker’s 22+ years of generally thoughtful, solid work are now buried beneath the weight of one mistake. (I know that I’m not helping.)
I’m not immune — none of us is. Last winter, a strange story made the rounds that Roberto Alomar was being sued by an ex-girlfriend who claimed he insisted on having unprotected sex despite knowing he had full-blown AIDS.
I’ve always disliked Alomar, who seemed to be mailing it in during his time with the Mets, and on Faith and Fear in Flushing I’ve savaged him repeatedly. In the wake of that news, I penned a blog post in which I grappled, fumblingly, with the possibility that he’d been struggling with a horrible disease while playing poorly. What I came up with was an imagined conversation between me and God, in which He takes me to task and makes me admit I don’t really wish terrible things on Alomar. If that doesn’t sound funny, it’s because it isn’t. My stomach felt a little funny, but I published the post anyway, hoping it wouldn’t attract much attention. Within 50 minutes one of our readers ripped me apart in the comments, and deservedly so.
Remember that weird neighborhood play that went the Yankees’ way in Game 2 of the ALCS? In the heat of battle I tweeted “Jerry Layne is a war criminal.” Ugh. If you’re going for raw satire you better be a lot funnier than that, and I soon regretted it. (And I apologize to Jerry Layne.)
I mulled deleting the offending tweet, but that’s a temptation you should avoid — if you try to make something disappear, someone will just dig it out of a Web cache, and you’ll look like a weasel on top of everything else. So ‘fess up and take your lumps. Besides, that tweet was quickly retweeted by a fairly prominent sportswriter (fantastic), so I just put my head down on my desk and thought, “Let that be a lesson.”
So a couple of weeks ago, New York magazine wrote a blog item linking to a Faith and Fear post I’d written explaining why Mets fans should root hard for the Phillies against the Yankees even though the Phils are our current big rival. That was great, and I was very happy – except what was used to demonstrate my Yankee-hater bona fides? The Jerry Layne tweet, of course.
The writer and I are good friends, and he meant me no harm. I don’t blame him a bit. Rather, I blame myself – and the Murphy’s Law of the Web.
If you write a blog, you’re your own editor – if your stomach’s doing flips, wait an hour and take a fresh look at your words. No matter what medium you’re in, entertain the possibility that your editor might be right. Keep in mind that the online audience is potentially huge, and what you write will last forever. And remember: butter side down.
Jason Fry spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy, and is now the Web evangelist for EidosMedia, a maker of editing-and-publishing software for newspapers and other publishers. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing (www.faithandfearinflushing.com), and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom (www.reinventingthenewsroom.com). Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jason.fry, or follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jasoncfry.
