I decided to start this blog because I'm tired of writing 500-word Facebook status updates.
Let's start by explaining who I am and who I'm not, and therefore, what this blog is and isn't. I'm a working journalist very early in her career. By 'very early,' I mean that referring to it as a career at all takes a certain amount of self-inflation. I work in journalism, largely by some strange instance of cosmic kismet for a very well-respected New England news organization. I'm privileged to collaborate regularly with some of the smartest and most talented people I've ever met, and I literally learn something new nearly every day.
About three times that frequently, I mess up. I'm not a perfect journalist. I don't even know if I'm a very good one. But I'm a workaholic with a one-track mind and very little tolerance for bullshit, and in journalism, you can coast on that for a little while.
I'm also passionate about the news. By that I mean THE NEWS itself - how it's written, how it's produced, and how the work of those who produce it can impact the public conversation.
And much of our news is bad. I mean, really bad - not just dire and pessimistic, but poorly considered, poorly researched, poorly argued and poorly written. Sometimes it's ideologically slanted or pure propaganda. Sometimes it's inane. Sometimes it's just wrong.
We all know this - seasoned and talented professional reporters, public consumers, and stumbling neophytes like me included. It sometimes feels like the more you read, the worse the problem gets. But what we all know is that the more you read and listen, the more you're beginning to perceive a small sliver of the giant ball of suck that the news can be.
So I've started a blog to complain about it.
By now it should be clear that this blog will NOT be a formal indictment for all journalistic sins. For one thing, I'd have to start with myself, and I'd probably never finish. It's not going to be an expert journalist offering professional journalistic criticism. There are a lot of better places to go for that.
It's just going to be me, Torchy, complaining about the things that annoy me. I don't pretend it'll be in any way comprehensive or consistent - some days it's a lot easier to annoy me than others, and there's plenty of subjects I just don't care enough about to develop a good head of blogging steam. (I wouldn't come here expecting a lot about sports.)
I'm also keenly aware of the dichotomy between being a responsible public journalist and a human being. Expect a lot of these posts to focus on reporter bias - how a reporter, consciously or otherwise, can adopt an apparent tone of objectivity but subtly lead his audience toward a particular conclusion. When I'm wearing my work hat, I spend a lot of time trying to eradicate any reporter bias from my work - sometimes with mixed results. But I don't intend to wear my work hat here, so don't expect objectivity. I'm loud, I curse a lot, I'm unapologetically liberal and hypocrisy infuriates me beyond any semblance of manners. You have been warned.
So anyway, the things I can't promise - consistency in tone or output, language your grandmother would approve of, tolerance for hypocrisy. I also don't intend to promise much self-editing, and probably not much sourcing. This is first and foremost a cathartic place for me, and catharsis doesn't really work if you're worrying about citing sources or checking your AP Style guide.
What can I promise then? Well, I promise to reply to comments with as much respect as the comments themselves demonstrate. I promise to supply links to stories I'm talking about, or if I'm discussing a trend or a context to find as many links as I can on it, because I actually do want people to form their own opinions rather than just swallowing mine.
So there. You get two promises. Take em or leave em. Let's roll.
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