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Journalism evolves, or it dies!!

Posted in Poking the Canucks, Ranting and Raving on February 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The bloggers already won, News-Times. You’re like a zombie walking around that doesn’t realize it’s dead.

It’s not 1952.

No matter how hard the Canadian-owned “local” papers want to insist, in pious editorials, that the world is still operating the same, it is not.

The reality is more people are getting their news online than from your print editions. Not as many people are still clipping articles to put on the frig. When they do it now, they’re printing them off the internet first, then posting them on said frig.

The News-Times claims “It’s from the local newspaper, you will learn about births, deaths, high school sports, weddings, engagements, anniversaries, what’s new in business and much more.”

Well sure, if you want to read about things three to five days after they happen, in as dry as terms as possible, than the Canuck-financed rags are your ideal landing spot.

I will try to be as nice as possible here, since I greatly respect the writer of that editorial, Keven Graves, and the man who holds the Sports Editor job at the News-Times, Jim Waller.

Blow it out your sanctimonious ass!

I am doing this part-time (without your reporters salaries and benefits and, I would hope, free donuts) and I have buried your papers.

I cover middle school sports. You do not. I will be in the Coupeville Middle School gym for four and a half hours today watching middle school girls’ basketball. Will you?

I cover JV sports. You do not.

I have written more than a hundred (I’m not being hyperbolic — go count them) features on Coupeville High School athletes, from superstars to bench players. You have not.

NO ONE is turning to the papers propped up by the robber barons in Moosejaw to find out what is happening in Coupeville. That’s reality.

You can disparage the bloggers all you want (we’re not “real” or “professional,” or “real professional”), but we are the ones actually breaking news. We are the ones covering what you’re not. We are the ones who don’t go home at 4:30.

I have published 668 articles and more than three times that number in photos in six months. Your papers, not so much. Really, really, really, really not so much.

And may I add, I find your statement “However, as a good editor once told me, a reporter must be able to look his or her sources in the eye at the grocery store,” to be slightly hilarious, since virtually all of your reporters DO NOT live in Coupeville. Heck, some of them don’t even live on Whidbey Island.

I see my sources at PC, I see them at the library, I see them at Christopher’s, I see them at games, because, oh I don’t know, I actually live in the town I cover. And when I do see them, I actually know their names.

It’s a whole new journalistic world out here in 2013, and your loss is the readers gain. They don’t have to wait for you to spoon-feed them a little dribble or two when other “non-professional” sources are willing to give them a waterfall.

Tonight the parents of girls like Skyler Lawrence and Maggie Crimmins will read about their daughters playing middle school hoops this afternoon. Not in your papers, of course, but they will find a way.

Journalism evolves, or it dies. It finds a way, whether you like it or not.

The News-Times editorial that chafed me a bit: http://www.whidbeynewstimes.com/opinion/193411851.html

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No one puts Jack in the corner!!

Posted in Movie Mania, Ranting and Raving on February 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »

They killed the Oscars last night.

It wasn’t the endless songs (Shirley Bassey brought the house down at 76 wailing “Goldfinger”), it wasn’t the wasted James Bond tribute (no Sean Connery on stage? GTFO!), the missing names in the parade of the dead section (no Andy Griffith?!?!), the lethargic pacing (a tribute to “Dreamgirls?,” which is 7 freakin’ years old — and no one liked it the first time), or even Seth McFarlane flop-sweating all over the stage — which is probably why Jennifer Lawrence slipped.

No, it was the moment at the end.

Not when “Argo” won.

The moment before.

The moment they brought out the greatest living movie star we have, a legend back on the stage after a five-year absence, and made him a prop.

Jack Nicholson is no one’s prop.

I don’t care if it’s Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, Ann Romney, or the ghosts of Reagan and Lincoln doing a buddy comedy routine.

Bringing out the greatest living movie star, a man who needs no introduction, the man with the sunglasses and the leer always playing at 11, and then having him hand-off the reveal of the Best Picture winner to ANY politician is a slap in the face of what the Oscars are.

The Oscars are Jack. Jack is the Oscars.

This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. This is bigger.

This is the Oscars. The holy grail of the movies, the night we come together to throw things at our TV screen when “Titanic” beats “L.A. Confidential.”

The night when John Wayne, stricken with cancer, ambles across the stage one final time and we still cry 34 years later.

The night when a dying William Holden surprises Barbara Stanwyck in the middle of their presentation and tells her what her support meant to him when he was a young actor a day away from being fired from his first major acting job.

The night when we see a streaker, when Marlon Brando flips the middle finger at the Academy, when Stanley Donen breaks in mid-speech and does a little soft shoe, when Vanessa Redgrave tells the world to go to hell, when Louise Fletcher signs her acceptance speech so her deaf parents will know how much she loves them, when Ali and Stallone go toe-to-toe.

It is a night about the movies, and through it all, there is Jack, front row center, always wearing the sunglasses, always punctuating Billy Crystal or Johnny Carson’s lines with a chuckle and a raised eyebrow.

We don’t have Bogart or Gable or Newman or Grant or Monroe or Davis or either Hepburn anymore.

We do have Jack, the greatest living movie star.

And when he takes that stage, he is the show. The whole show.

He is NOT a damn prop.

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I’m too old for this … whatever that is in the bottom of the drain?!?!

Posted in Ranting and Raving on February 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

“Save us, Mrs. Butterworth! You’re our only hope!!”

Someone needs to save my fingers.

Someone needs to go back in time, to that moment in 2009 when I got an unexpected $10,000 from my grandmother’s estate, to the moment BEFORE I blew most of it on (an admittedly awesome) DVD collection which now sits in a dark storage shed owned by the spawn of Satan, and slap me.

Hard. And often.

Go back to that moment, in the final days of David’s DVD Den, when I was entwined with the lawyer who would one day own my copies of “Hell Up in Harlem,” “Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death,” “Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem” (yes, that’s how it’s spelled) and 2,500+ other shiny lil’ discs.

I remember the giddy stupidity of those days, as box after box arrived from Amazon. Popping the protective plastic inserts. Watching the florescent lights shining off of Jodie Foster’s face.

The complete Abbott and Costello.

The complete Woody Allen. The complete Coen brothers. The complete Scorsese. And on and on.

The Frankie and Annette beach party movies. The Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monster flicks.

The complete Shirley Temple (hey now! she’s the greatest movie star of all time, so back off!!).

A nearly complete collection of ’70s black exploitation flicks. Pam Grier. Need I say more?

Every bizarre one-off film I wanted (“El Topo,” “The Candy Snatchers,” “Shortbus,” “God Told Me To”) — who cares if they ever rent? I didn’t!!

Opera. An entire set of two-disc (with booklet!) opera DVDs, shot live in Italy. Cause why the hell not?!?!

If someone had knocked me out of my daze in those unfortunate days, maybe I wouldn’t be paying the bills now as a dish dog.

Slowly crushing my fingers — the digits that type these stories — abusing them in a semi-nightly dance with half-eaten rice, razor-sharp mussel shells, butter-coated lemon wedges and some other things it’s best to just not think about as you try and jam them down a drain that is not fond of actually … draining.

I have worked in far worse places than the restaurant I work at now, which is a classy joint run by nice people.

But the reality is, nothing about being a dish dog, wherever it is, is fun.

It is, at its core, a stinky, depressing slog through the bottom end of the sewer, and it is beating the crud out of my fingers.

So I daydream about a time loop and that $10,000 coming back around and me being smarter and sitting outside full-time this spring, doing nothing but covering sports while others deal with au gratin potatoes night.

I don’t even need $10,000 for that. $3,000 and I coast for four months. And then…

Maybe we should go back further.

To that time when a 23-year old decided after two-plus years as a sports editor at a twice-weekly paper to “try something new” and ended up out on a run-down mussel boat in Penn Cove — still the worst job in the world next to being the eyeball-licker at a slaughterhouse.

Let’s punch that guy. Right in the stupid face.

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20 years and they ain’t touched me yet!!

Posted in Memories, Ranting and Raving, Wrestling on February 17, 2013| Leave a Comment »

This is an artifact called a newspaper…

Next Sunday is the 20-year anniversary of a journalistic milestone … of sorts.

Feb. 24, 1993 I ran the single biggest headline in the history of the Whidbey News-Times. A paper that has existed for well over 100 years, and no one else can claim that.

So, that’s something.

Being an idiot who had not yet hit 22, but who had, somehow, managed to worm his way into the Sports Editor job at a twice-weekly newspaper with not a single day of college (think about that, Ballard’s class!), I ran amuck.

I was an editor, so no one saw my pages until they flowed off the presses downstairs, 10,000+ copies of them at a time.

Odd photos? Check! Poems on the sports page? Why not! Inflammatory opinion pieces? I would be delighted!

I didn’t know the rules, so, when I broke them all, I had little idea I was actually, you know, breaking the rules. I was entertaining myself, and they gave me a paycheck for it.

And then we hit February and the Oak Harbor High School wrestling team put on a run never seen before, and never seen again, until Dave Ward and crew went out and won a state football title.

In the days before the internet (stop hyperventilating … it existed), and at a time when the newspaper had no desire to pay for me to travel to Tacoma, the results from Mat Classic V came in via phone. And not a cell phone (again, stop hyperventilating).

After day one, the Wildcats were locked in a duel with Mead for a state team title, which would have been the first in school history. Meanwhile, Joe Sarpy, the splendid, unbeaten 101-pounder, was halfway to an individual title.

This was gonna be huge, so I decided to go big. I mean, really big.

And then the ‘Cats fell just short of a team title. BUT, Sarpy won.

So, I ran the single biggest headline in newspaper history. Sarpy went to work at Burger King and found the store windows plastered with copies of the paper.

And I had the 12,209th conversation with editor Fred Obee in which the newspaper guru rubbed his temples gently, chuckled at odd times to keep me on edge and told me, in nice terms, that I was why he was going bald.

“You realize if you stand upstairs in the newsroom and look downstairs where the paper is pasted up (old school reference #3!) you can read the headline … without … even squinting?”

“Thank you!!”

“What? I didn’t mean it that way and … OK, here’s the headline for WAR DECLARED from World War II and here’s SARPY RULES! Do you see what I’m sayin’?”

“Yep. My headline kicked World War II’s butt!! Probably had to save on ink with the shortages and all…”

“You’re a frickin’ idiot, son.”

“Thank you, sir. That means a lot coming from you.”

And they always wondered why Obee often stood outside smoking like a chimney, rocking gently back and forth, mumbling to himself?

I knew.

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Who’s 6 months old today? We are, that’s who!!

Posted in Ranting and Raving on February 16, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Six months today.

Six months of mocking ATM, of spats with Sultan, of major brouhahas with South Whidbey. And don’t even get me started on the carpet baggers who sold the Examiner to the robber barons from Canada.

Six months of joyous highs and rough lows. Six months of epic wins and tortuous losses. Six months of returning to covering events live and in-person again, and remembering just how hard the bleachers are, and how frickin’ cold and windy an open-air football stadium can be in November.

Six months of writing whatever I feel like, running ten billion photos and (mostly) staying one step ahead of the authorities.

Whether you think I’m a force for good (shining spotlights on middle school and JV players) or a P.T. Barnum of the internet age, ranting and raving and mixing gossip, smack talk and too many exclamation points, one thing’s for sure. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

Someone out there is reading me. 75,000 page views (and a delightful collection of hate mail from the crayon scrawlers in Sultan) doesn’t lie.

Where is this all going? That’s a good question.

It’s a bit of a high-wire act. Push the local school administrations too far, and they might cut off my access. But, the time of reporting, three days later, in clinical, stale prose, doesn’t interest me anymore.

If I’ve learned anything in these six months, it’s this — I don’t know anything.

Stories I thought would be big sometimes thudded. Stories I thought of as an afterthought sometimes shot upwards, with the page view meter clicking away.

You never know.

The question I get asked most (well, after “Did you hit your head?”) is, “What are the most read stories in the history of the site?”

At this moment, out of 625 articles, the top 10 are:

1) “URGENT: Local fisherman missing, help needed!!”
2) “Sad end to hunt for local fisherman”
3) “EXCLUSIVE: South Whidbey’s best player walks, talks!!”
4) “Faith guides Brett Arnold through hard times”
5) “Keep fighting with the grace that you always have!!”
6) “Farm Dog — forever a friend of the world!!”
7) “This is our Island!!”
8) “South Whidbey 30, Refs 26, Wolves 45!!”
9) “Fleming, Arnold go bonkers in close loss!!”
10) “Wolf receiver juggles dirty diapers, big pass plays!!”

And the least read of all-time? I’m not gonna tell you the answer to that one. Wouldn’t be fair to the person involved.

I can tell you that Coupeville High School senior Caleb “The Page Hit King” Valko has appeared in an astonishing 104 articles, followed by Bessie Walstad (93), Nick Streubel (86) and Breeanna Messner (75). I refuse to tally up everyone’s totals, but watch out for Wolf sophomores Madeline Strasburg, Kacie Kiel and McKayla Bailey — they’re coming for Valko.

And that points to the biggest change in my sports-writing over the past six months.

After years of working as a virtually non-paid freelancer for the Examiner, I am now a virtually non-paid blogger who actually cares again.

You can’t watch these kids in person, game in and game out, and not care. Am I an impartial journalist? Not anymore.

I actually punched my notebook after one play during a game this season, and got an arched eyebrow from my high school journalism teacher (and News-Times sports editor) Jim Waller.

And I’m fine with that.

Before I started coupevillesports.com, I knew Valko as a name that popped up in football, basketball and track stories. Now I know that he’s a complex dude, an onion with many layers.

He may put on a too-cool-for-school persona at times, but he’s actually a sensitive, caring guy who loves his mama, bleeds for his teammates and gets excited about free cupcakes.

Without doing this blog, I would never have known that Jared Helmstadter was just two pounds when he was born prematurely (he’s 6-foot now), that Messner is hilarious when she’s gassed after wisdom tooth surgery, that Kole Kellison actually has a dry sense of humor, why Bailey is called Turtle Shell and a million other little things that form a grand mosaic of Coupeville and its athletes.

But now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

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