From our Better Late Than Never Dept: The NFL says requests for media credentials for this weekend’s Super Bowel are down for the first time in recent memory. According to Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher, two major dailies — the Atlanta journal-Constitution and the Hartford Courant — are not sending anyone to what is arguably the most boring game of this or any season, which is really saying something when it comes to American “football.” And The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News all are sending fewer staffers than in previous years, probably because all three have fewer staffers, period.
Says Chris Vivlamore, AJC pro sports editor, “Part of it is the cost and we want to do more local stories.” Good on you, Chris. How about taking a stab at covering something that hasn’t already been beaten to death on TV — like, uh, say, bicycle racing?
Meanwhile, here’s an interesting piece from American Journalism Review: Robert Hodierne catches up with a few ex-newsies to ask, “Is there life after newspapers?”
Welcome to the working week. I know it don’t thrill you; I hope it don’t kill you. Meanwhile, this just in from TheDaily Shit Monsoon: 43,000 jobs are headed down the loo. Caterpillar plans to croak 20,000. Sprint Nextel unplugs 8,000. Ditto the expected merger of dope giants Pfizer and Wyeth. Home Depot lops off 7,000 heads. But Ronald McDonald is in line for a fat bonus. I’m lovin’ it.
January should be struck from the calendar. What a waste of days. One day you’re singing the praises of global warming as you cycle along in summer kit, and the next you’re freezing your nutsack off and watching it “snow,” which in Colorado these days means greasing the streets just enough to keep the ERs and body shops busy.
I'm goin' down — down, down, down, down, down.
If I had any brains and a little money to go along with them I’d be camping in McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Arizona. Alas, I am short on both. Herself’s Subaru just got about four years’ worth of service all at once, and paydays remain uncertain as publishers try to find a pulse somewhere on the bike business.
The new owners of VeloNews have a mania for contracts that delayed my check for services rendered during January as online editor at large of the VeloNews.com website, and now we must negotiate a deal for the remaining 11 months of 2009. I’ve gotten along just fine for the past 20 years without a written deal with VeloNews, and so has VeloNews, but as the song goes, the times they are a-changin’.
Now we must set down at length in black and white what both parties already know — that for chasing typos around Al Gore’s Intertubes I will get a monthly paycheck and nothing else, and can be cut loose at any time with neither severance nor notice. Feh. When has it ever been otherwise? Cycling journalism is not a union gig, last time I checked.
And anyway, I learned a long time ago that a union card isn’t exactly a crucifix when it comes to warding off corporate vampires. The Newspaper Guild provided about as much protection as a thousand-year-old rubber when I found myself at odds with the management of The Pueblo Chieftain back in 1985. I negotiated my own buyout and got the fuck out of Dodge before they could sack my dumb ass. Before long I found an even worse job, at the Sentinel Publishing Co. in Denver, which laid me off two years later. No golden parachute that time, just six months of unemployment insurance.
My man Hal Walter is staring down that long lightless tunnel now, trying to figure out what’s next. He has a wife, child, mortgage and truck payment, in a changing world that seems to no longer need newspapers, so he can’t do what I did in January 1988 — give up the apartment, throw the dog and some essentials in the truck, and go looking for another newspaper job.
In honor of President Barack Hussein Obama, here’s a column I wrote for Bicycle Retailer & Industry News. And for his predecessor, here’s some advice from Jay of Jay and Silent Bob from “Clerks 2.” The important part comes at 18 seconds in.
After a week of consuming nothing but sauerkraut, bratwurst, baked beans and non-alcoholic beer, The Decider blows one final defiant, nucular fart in the White House before scuttling back to Texas.
Feels kind of like Christmas Eve, doesn’t it? What’s that over there under the Tree of Liberty? Why, yes, Virginia (and the other 49 states, too) — it’s a brand-new White House, one without shit all over it! It’s the gift that keeps on giving, when it’s not overrun by rats, roaches and other vermin, and you can open it tomorrow.
You know it’s time for a change when even Oklahoma is fed up with an executive branch besmirched by the sort of vicious dolt it usually sends to Congress. Leonard Nelson, 63, a 23-year military veteran of both the Army and the Navy, voted for Barack Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain. “But I’ve come to think the better man won,” he told The New York Times. And indeed he did.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Obama can’t walk on water, nor turn water into wine. If you must have mythology, look to the tale of Sisyphus and hope, as did the outgoing president’s favorite read, Albert Camus, that he will be happy in his ceaseless toil. There are a lot of rocks to roll, and nothing but mountains for miles around.
Mad Blog Media 