One thing that was sorely lacking from the past two weeks of convention spotlighting was good alt weekly coverage. Denver’s Westword and St. Paul-Minneapolis’s City Pages, both Village Voice Media entities, cross-linked their blogs, titled respectively, Demver and Elephants in the Room. But even with the collaborative ink, the stories were predictable fare.
Westword’s most-touted recurring convention gimmick was a cartoon-prose characterization combo of the Democratic delegates by state, by cartoonist Kenny Be. Here’s a taste:
Wyoming delegates in Denver, for one, would be wearing “April Cornell® for Orvis collection of side-yoked skirts and smocked dresses” (women) and “Riviera® Wrinkle-Resistant Dress Pants and Nat Nast® Panhandle Slim Camp Shirts with H.S.Trask® bison-leather oxfords and two pair of socks” (men). Wisconsinites, on the other hand, would feel they have something to prove, 50 years after McCarthy’s glory days, and “dress to avenge…[in] gold and green Joe PackerFan bodylifter pants with a variety of favorite sweatshirts, the newness of which corresponds directly to the formality of the occasion.”
It would be one thing if it were steadily funny, but take this doozy: “Californians will be the most gorgeous delegates in Denver, with the best haircuts, most stylish clothes and most beautiful smiles.” (Yes, we get it. Hollywood. Sun. Shine.) And anyway, isn’t it a bit prosaic to mock the delegates so thoroughly?
City Pages decided to go for the real deal with photos of the Republican delegates on the convention floor, but maybe there was some conference calling between the two blogs, because the tone was pretty much the same in its version:
…it seemed fitting to commemorate [Sarah Palin’s] impeding coronation as queen of American conservatism by locating the Republicaniest Republican in the convention hall. The field, as you might imagine, was bewilderingly vast and competitive.
Memo: the “we’re on safari, check out the wildlife” theme is not that funny. The check out the delegates mission is documented with pictures of delegates looking bored, or wearing elephant trunks on their heads. The winner? A twenty-four-year-old public-office-seeking young man that, you got it, Looks Like a Young Republican. (Tortoise-shell frames. Side part. Broad-shouldered.)
Is that the best these cross-linking alt weekly sites could do? Consolidation of the alt weeklies under VVM has had loyal readers biting their nails for years, and the above appear to be the somewhat sad results: easy humor posing as cleverness, recycled points of view, and a depressing lack of freshness. Where were the witty pinpricks to the two-party political underbelly this past week, or barring that, the stories that were simply original?
It’s too late now, but next time—even with the Hand of Homogenizing Editorial Taste caressing your back—it might help to keep a couple of things in mind.
If you’re going to write about something rather predictable, at least make the zings clever, as did the Boston Phoenix with its guide to protesting the 2004 DNC in Boston:
Whatever message you’ve come to disseminate — MEAT IS MURDER; DISSENT IS PATRIOTIC; DECRIMINALIZE POT; STOP ABUSING WORKERS’ RIGHTS; THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE MOTORIZED; END REALITY TV — you obviously want to write it on something, since the television stations will probably drown your chanting with voice-over narration. Cambridge’s Pearl Fine Arts is one of the best art stores in the area, with every kind of marker, paintbrush, and poster-board size imaginable.
And if you’re just going for a good, original story, take a page from this Village Voice article, which ran during the 2004 RNC in New York City, about a German network using a marathon runner to deliver taped coverage of an anti-Republican march:
On Sunday morning in Manhattan, a producer for the German network ZDF turned to Stefani Jackenthal, handed her a DVCPRO tape, and said, "Go." Jackenthal once completed a 10-day adventure race that mixed trail running with mountain biking and kayaking…. But when Jackenthal set off at 11:23 a.m., it wasn't to contend with rapids and rocks, but to… [get] material from ZDF's reporters down in Chelsea through the march and back to the broadcast base near Madison Square Garden. The march was expected to reach them around noon, but the ZDF crew had to have footage ready by 12:50 p.m. in order to make the German evening news.
And Jackenthal performed, “racing through the maze of protesters, cops, and media to deliver footage before ZDF's deadline.” It took her eight minutes.
Now, VVM or no, that’s a good convention story for the books.
I'm sure you'll hear from Westword reporters who broke original stories about the DNC (and there were plenty) but Kenny Be, the staff cartoonist behind "Delegating Denver," is on a much-deserved vacation, and I don't want your superficial dismissal to be the final word on his impressive body of work. Kenny Be may well be the only full-time staff cartoonist on any alternative weekly (not that many still dailies still have this position); he's the town's best political columnist -- even if his weekly columns are in cartoon form. In advance of the DNC coming to town, he decided to add to his load by doing a cartoon profile of each delegation over the 56 weeks leading to the convention. You can see the results(and you have to see them -- to quote lines without the context of the artwork is hardly fair) at http://blogs.westword.com/demver/delegating_denver_by_kenny_be/
patricia calhoun, editor
One wonders on what basis Ms. Kim sought to ridicule writers at City Pages and Westword as having provided "easy humor posting as cleverness, recycled points of view, and a depressing lack of freshness."
Having read Kim's own blog posts from the RNC, I can only assume she felt our writers should have lived up to her own high standard. This would include posts noting that the old Heart song "Barracuda" was played over the P.A. when Palin finished her speech; detailing the travails of a blogger trying to get press credentials; and commenting on the fashion sense of the Palin family.
This, apparently, is the CJR-approved standard we must now meet when attempting to "at least make the zings clever."
I believe it may already have been pointed out to Ms. Kim that one of our reporters in Minneapolis, Matt Snyders, was arrested while covering a protest march. Two others, Jeff Shaw and Andy Mannix, were roughed up and pepper-sprayed respectively.
If your readers are interested, they can read Snyders' account of his arrest here:
http://blogs.citypages.com/gop/2008/09/a_weird_thing_h.php
Shaw's and Mannix's stories also are available at citypages.com
Perhaps Ms. Kim would like to read them and then weigh in on the question of whether their treatment at the hands of the authorities was "simply original" enough for her.
I might add that the experiences of Snyders, Shaw and Mannix were a direct result of their decision to actually go out and cover news, rather than focusing on "the various shades of Banana Republic grey" worn by the Palins.
Should Ms. Kim ever suffer the misfortune of being arrested or pepper-sprayed for trying to do her job as a reporter, one hopes she does not suffer the additional misfortune of having her work and that of her colleagues belittled by a condescending national journalism publication.
As for the immensely talented Kenny Be in Denver, by my lights he's among the best editorial cartoonists working in America today. I would invite your readers to view his work about the DNC at westword.com and judge for themselves whether his body of work measures up to "witty pinpricks" as uproarious as the Boston Phoenix advising protesters where to go to buy art supplies.
Andy Van De Voorde
Executive Associate Editor
Village Voice Media
As a Columbia alum (Class of '01) and the editor in chief of one of the alternative weeklies in question, I am writing to express my deep disappointment at the shallowness of Jane Kim's reporting.
Starting on Sunday, August 31, my team posted more than 75 items covering every aspect of the Republican National Convention, from the protests to the speeches, and replete with multimedia. Kim cites exactly one of them in making her case, and it was a post based entirely on sight gags, which doesn't translate when she quotes just one paragraph of text.
In reporting the convention, one of my reporters was Maced while he was on his knees with his hands behind his head. Another was roughed up by police. A third spent a night in jail, one of the more than 30 journalists arrested during the RNC. They deserve better than this hatchet job written from the comfort of an Upper Westside ivory tower.
But no, it wasn't all serious—we had some lighthearted posts as well. I'm particularly proud of Bradley Campbell's liveblogging on Tuesday and Thursday. If Kim read these pieces and didn't get at least a chuckle, someone needs to check her pulse (or her sense of humor).
It seems clear from the tone of this piece that Kim went in with a set of preconceived ideas—the all-too-easy meme that corporate ownership leads to homogenization—and wasn't going to let the facts get in her way at 4:42 p.m. on a Friday. Being a journal of press criticism, CJR needs to hold itself to a higher standard than this.
Kevin Hoffman
Editor in chief
City Pages
I wasn't able to follow Westword's or City Pages' convention coverage last week, but I do know that both papers broke significant news in the weeks prior to the conventions.
In May, City Pages broke a story about the FBI's effort to infiltrate peace-activist groups in the Twin Cities:
http://www.citypages.com/2008-05-21/news/moles-wanted/
And in August, Westword revealed the location of the holding cells for DNC protesters, i.e., a warehouse that was deemed by local officials to be too warm to house electronic voting machines:
http://blogs.westword.com/demver/2008/08/dnc_protester_holding_cells_we.php
I should also note that at least a couple dozen other alt-weeklies had folks on the ground covering the conventions in Denver and/or St. Paul (see list below).
Richard Karpel
Executive Director
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies
http://aan.org
http://AltWeeklies.com
Artvoice (Buffalo)
Athens (Ohio) News
Boise Weekly
Boulder Weekly
C-Ville Weekly (Charlottesville, Va.)
Colorado Springs Independent
Creative Loafing (six papers)
Independent Weekly (Durham, NC)
Las Vegas Weekly
Memphis Flyer
Metroland (Albany)
New Mass Media (4 papers)
Philadelphia City Paper
Phoenix Media Communications (3 papers)
San Antonio Current
San Diego CityBeat
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Santa Barbara Independent
Santa Fe Reporter
The Stranger (Seattle)
Urban Tulsa Weekly
Willamette Week (Portland, Ore.)
oh wow, so the only people commenting on this are editors and execs at new times--oops i mean village voice media!--papers. how funny. and rich karpel is stepping in like a lapdog to help.
face it, andy, you guys screwed up several pretty good papers and put louts like hoffman in charge.
This is Dave Maass, staff writer at the Santa Fe Reporter and master of SFR's 2008 election blog, Swing State of Mind. I don't whether to be insulted that you didn't take a look at our coverage or to be relieved that you didn't rip it apart. Nah, I've decided. I'm insulted.
Let me point out a few highlights of our coverage of the Democratic National Convention.
1) It was just me at the DNC on an extremely limited budget. I understand the local daily gave their reporter a $1,400 budget. I spent less than $200.
2) Prior to convention we ran a cover story called Denver or Bust, which may have been lackluster by your definition, but exactly what our readership needed. We also followed up with two stories, a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style piece on navigating the chaos of the DNC and then a view-from-afar straight news piece about Santa Fe's delegation to the RNC.
2) The biggest accomplishment of the pre-convention coverage was our blog's interactive DNC Web o' Power. We meticulously researched every single New Mexico delegate to the DNC and mapped out the connections between them, institutions, lobbyist firms, political campaigns etc.
3) Our of the DNC included 30 live posts, no small feat for a single reporter. The gamut was covered: events and interviews with local delegates, antiwar and antiabortion protests documentation, Clinton speech commentary, a mini-war with another blogger back home, a discussion of DNC sponsor ships and the ethics of accepting free meals and shwag.
4)One thing I'm particularly proud of is the video footage of the protester arrests on the first night of the convention. The Denver police had blocked off a square block in order to arrest a mass of demonstrators and completely closed off media access. I infiltrated the New York delegation's reception and got exclusive footage from the window of the hotel ballroom of the arrests I had that footage online before the papers hit the stands the new morning.. Altogether we uploaded 15 videos: commentary, protest footage, priceless moments and convention flavor.
5)Throughout the week, we streamed live video from the Big Tent; visitors could watch and also chat with me about the mood convention, my take on the speeches and make suggestions about what sort of issues they'd like me to cover.
I won't toot my horn anymore than that, but you really oughta check it out before branding everything homogeneous. Considering the limitations of smaller alt weeklies, I think I did OK.
Gosh, Jane. Guess you missed the post from your own publication just three weeks before praising Westword's "Golden reporting" about the DNC.
http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/a_leak_investigation.php
Not suprised, given the lazy effort you gave into the analysis.