Month / August 2007

by Edward Champion

Those Who Asked for Teresa Weaver’s Job to Be Saved Are “Competitors”

The September/October 2007 issue of Poets and Writers includes an interview with Teresa Weaver, in which she is asked about the future of book reviewing and gives this answer:

I have to say I don’t feel optimistic about it, as far as newspapers go. I think magazines are going to have to step in and pick up some of that slack. A lot of it is a resource problem: Newspapers are struggling right now, they’re redefining themselves, and there’s a lot of discussion going on everywhere about what direction they should take. I line up with the school of thought that newspapers should consist of more opinion, commentary, and analysis that people can’t get anywhere else, rather than trying to compete with the Internet on breaking news.

Beyond my concern that the two “sides” of this battle are on opposite ends of the fence (So we’re competitors now, eh? As someone who writes for both online and print, I’m wondering if I should cut myself in half or something.), I must say that Weaver comes across as decidedly ungrateful about the very medium — and its concomitant petition — that was used to generate awareness about the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s books section.

by Edward Champion

Without Written Permission

Techcrunch’s Duncan Riley unearths this YouTube morsel (the irony here being that uploading such a clip to YouTube also requires written permission from the NFL). The NFL is now stating that one cannot discuss a football game without written permission. It was bad enough that we couldn’t videotape football games without written permission — although, to my knowledge, there have been no smoke-filled speakeasies involving clandestine game watching and secret passwords, perhaps because the participants have remained circumspect about such iniquitious dens. Now the NFL hopes to legislate conversation around the water cooler. (Whether they actually pursue lawsuits for this sort of thing requires additional research.) Beyond the fact that this violates the spirit of fair use (much less fails to account for the realities of spontaneous conversation), it nevertheless demonstrates the arrogant and anti-First Amendment attitudes taken by some organizations, in which a reasonable protection of trademarks and copyrighted material is undermined by the natural human dissemination of names and content.

Here are some questions: Does the NFL want their teams talked about? Do they want to control the precise circumstances in which a person wears an Oakland Raiders jacket? Will they likewise curtail journalists and bloggers from writing about football players because they don’t have written permission? (And, if so, will they require tight journalistic credentials with set terms for how one writes about sports?)

by Edward Champion

Might the Blogosphere Meet the Bill?

“American creative energy has always teetered on the brink of insanity. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and ‘The Night Chicago Died’ have, alas, common DNA, the DNA for ‘joyfully reckless confidence.’ What I propose as an antidote is simply: awareness of the Megaphonic tendency, and discussion of same. Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. Every request for the clarification of the vague, every poke at smug banality, every pen stroke in a document under revision is the antidote. This battle, like any great moral battle, will be won, if won, not with some easy corrective tidal wave of Total Righteousness, but with small drops of specificity and aplomb and correct logic, delivered titrationally, by many of us all at once.”

— George Saunders, title essay from The Braindead Megaphone