On being Brian Hamilton, Eating Cake, and Whimpers

Really, thank God Brian Hamilton and the editorial staff of the Chicago Tribune are a bunch of desperate morons looking to manufacture news in order to improve their bottom line and keep their new owner from axing them like he’s been axing so many others. It gives us all something to talk about until football practices start for Notre Dame. I’ve been working on a pretty stats-heavy post for the last few days, but it’s been a lot of work to put together. Writing about this Brian Hamilton thing has been easy – hardly any effort is required at all. This must be what being Brian Hamilton is like.

At any rate, El Kabong of NDNation.com has written up some thoughts on the entire matter, and here’s the summary of his point:

Some people are acting like this is all Brian Hamilton’s fault and if he wouldn’t have written the story, it’d all be fine. That’s not the case. BH bears some of the blame for writing a non-story, but an equal part of the problem is the public jones for stories like this. BH could leave the Tribune tomorrow, and we’d still see these kinds of stories. The only way to truly combat them is to not read them and let people know they’re not necessary.

And on the face of it, that seems like a reasonable argument. In essence, El Kabong is saying, “fight the disease, not the symptom.” He argues that Hamilton feels he has to write these sorts of pieces because if he doesn’t, someone else will, and this is the sort of thing “the public” craves.

But what El Kabong (who, by the way, I respect quite a bit) and the editors of the Chicago Tribune (who, as you might have guessed, I do not) are failing to grasp is that news media, as the Tribune would argue itself to be, and sites like TheBigLead.com, which originally posted the photos of ND football players at a party and apparently have people like Hamilton feeling mighty threatened, aren’t even in the same industry. So why does the Tribune feel it needs to compete with blogs? Because their ad revenue numbers are down? So what? That doesn’t mean that a company that wants to represent itself as a news source gets to also play in the muddy waters of gossip and speculation in which blogs like TBL (and HLS) roll around. By what proclamation does the newspaper industry have a right to revenue that never shrinks? If the public’s craving for news has dropped while its craving for gossip increases, that’s just too bad for the Tribune. Either they must completely abandon any sense of being a reputable news source, or get accustomed to watching the gossip game from the sidelines while operating on a set of more limited resources. That’s the Tribune’s burden to bear, and it’s certainly no excuse for the Tribune to manufacture news. Sure, it’s only sports, but I can’t help but wonder where else in the paper the editors feel it’s okay to speculate and represent gossip as news as well. Further, how is it that news outlets have identified blogs as the threat to their revenue source? Have they looked at novels, comic books, or poetry readings? Those all seem to involve the written word in some fashion, and as near as I can tell, that’s the only commonality between blogs and news sources. Perhaps the Tribune could create a new section: “Fiction.” They already seem to have a knack for it. Or maybe they could create a comic book and sell the story to a major movie studio – lots of revenue to be had there. Or maybe they could publish more poetry. One particular piece comes to mind.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.