Just when I have gone and condemned baseball as a stultifying and backward-thinking sport, thereby alienating approximately 47 percent of the already modest readership of this corner of cyberspace--well, along come the Mets, whose general manager, Omar Minaya, having previously hired Tyler Durden as VP for player development, defended himself by auditioning for the role of media ombudsman, accusing an unsuspecting Daily News reporter named Adam Rubin of "lobbying" for a job in player development. This led to a press conference of the genre classified by cultural anthropologists and light-beer enthusiasts as "extremely uncomfortable," during which a man's career flashes before our very eyes.
In this case, it was immediately clear that, even if Minaya's accusations were completely true (and Rubin claims they are exaggerated), his attempt to deflect the blame was embarrassingly ill-advised. And while Rubin may have erred in his judgment (though given the nature of the newspaper business, one can hardly blame him), the error appears forgivable and had little or nothing to do with the actual business at hand. "My reporting was solid, met the journalistic standards of sourcing and beyond and was untainted by any personal agenda on my part," Rubin wrote, and at this point, I have little reason to doubt him, because he is a trained journalist who is getting paid for his work and who publicly disclosed his role in this situation, and the Mets' management appears to have corroborated his account. In other words, no one denied he wrote the truth.
This is not an ideal situation, but in the end, this the way it should be. There is course correction on both ends, and we move forward, with Minaya clinging to his job and Tony Bernazard/Tyler Durden accepting a position a prominent soap company. Still, I have no idea if this is the way it will be in the future, most notably if the future is being prophesized correctly by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and the author of book called Free, which Malcolm Gladwell ably dissected in this New Yorker piece. In what seems like a deliberately contentious interview with a German magazine called Der Spiegel, Anderson declared that the very concepts of "media" and "journalism" and "news" are antiquated, 20th-century notions, stated that "newspapers are not important," and then said this:
Attention and reputation are two non-monetary economies. The vast majority of people online write for free. We've tried paying some of our bloggers and they thought it was insulting. They're not doing it for the money, they're doing it for attention and reputation, or just for fun....In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby.
So here's a question: If Adam Rubin were, say, a lifelong fan of the New York Mets, who was, shall we say, writing about this for a blog called "The Daily News," would this story have ever broken in the first place? Or would Rubin have decided it was in the best interests of the fans to maintain Bernazard/Durden's place in the organization, and to preserve Omar Minaya's reputation? And if he had broken this story, and Minaya had accused him of a conflict of interest--of accepting free box seats or cheering in the press box or soliciting autographs from David Wright--well, what would be the repercussions? In our hypothetical scenario, Adam Rubin is working for free, doing it for the attention and the reputation, and treating his public responsibility as a hobby...so how would he ever be held accountable*, and how would anyone know what to actually believe? (Besides, don't the Mets embody enough moral complexities without adding another layer?)
This is the future Anderson appears to be heralding, a future that most intelligent bloggers don't even advocate,** a future that may be economically viable but that is also intellectually dangerous. My guess is that even Omar Minaya understands this now.
*And don't tell me his audience would hold him accountable, because if this were true, Perez Hilton cease to exist.
**According to a survey conducted by my alma mater and all-around bitchin' party school Penn State University, 75 percent of sports bloggers do not see themselves as rivals of professional journalists. The other 25 percent were busy searching Bing for photos of Megan Fox.
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