On Why Are Reporters Constantly Misquoting People?
@jfruh You do actually work in your pajamas though right?
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On Why Are Reporters Constantly Misquoting People?
Anyway I'm just happy when interview subjects speak in complete, coherent sentences that don't read as gibberish on the page.
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On Why Are Reporters Constantly Misquoting People?
This happened to me in what was basically my first journalistic assignment ever. I was asked to do a profile of a newly-elected City Commission candidate for our quite widely-read student newspaper. The guy made a bunch of disparaging statements about students and their awful effect on the city (this was a college town where maybe 2/3 of the population was university-affiliated) and how he was going to crack down on them. I wrote it up straight but my editor saw his comments and was like "Whoa whoa whoa, that's the whole story right there!"
I said I really wasn't sure about the context of his statements, and negotiated with the editor to hold the story so I could call him back and give him a chance to defend himself.
I call him back the next day, and he makes *even more disparaging* remarks about students (to a student, writing for a student newspaper). We ran the story and he refused to speak to me for the next four years, even when I was covering city government.
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On Kanye West, Hunger Artist
Just from his Twitter account I would've probably gone with Knut Hamsun's Hunger, which, quoth Wikipedia: "recounts the adventures of a starving young man whose sense of reality is giving way to a delusionary existence on the darker side of a modern metropolis. While he vainly tries to maintain an outer shell of respectability, his mental and physical decay are recounted in detail."
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On But What Is Kanye West's Baby Doing For Our Economy?
This is basically a variation on the Broken Windows Fallacy -- call it the Royal Baby Fallacy.
Also, France decapitated their monarch 220 years ago and they get almost three times as many tourists as England. Perhaps because you can actually GO INSIDE the royal palace as there is not some demented old woman living there?
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On The Dull Rich Death of American Cities
Well at least things are looking up for Pittsburgh and Cleveland!
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On American Cities I'd Prefer To See Get Blown Up In The Movies Instead of New York
To be fair, the one area where we can really compete with New York is "getting blown up in movies."
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On Poems Are Selfies Your Mind Takes
I think Balk created this guy as an alter ego just to make his enemies look bad. A false flag, just like Benghazi!
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On American Cities I'd Prefer To See Get Blown Up In The Movies Instead of New York
Once again the Awl ignores Washington, DC.
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On Why Are Reporters Constantly Misquoting People?
@jfruh I can't lie, when we were visiting Baltimore all I could think was "Man, how awesome would it be to quit my dumb job in DC and buy some cheap-ass house here and go back to freelancing."