He's a man. ... He's a card player, gambler, scoundrel. You'd like him.

I had a good laugh after reading the Aug. 13 blog post by Sacramento News & Review Arts Editor Nick Miller at "Alt Sac". Miller, no relation, was pissed off by an SN&R review posted on Yelp by Midtown Monthly contributor Tony King. He goes into a fury in the comment section and participates in a back-and-forth with Midtown Monthly editor Tim Foster, who signs off as "omf."

Read "SN&R vs. Midtown Monthly on Yelp!" for more information.

Click here to read the reviews of the Sacramento News & Review at Yelp.

Click here to read the reviews of the Midtown Monthly at Yelp.




How's how I see it:

Tony K. is a little too self congratulatory of his own magazine in a separate Yelp review. Public reviews are not the place to defend the deadline of a monthly. Every publication has space to fill. You struggle to fill space when you're unprepared, reporters fail to meet deadlines or an article has serious holes. It sounds nostalgic to longingly talk about the pressure of busting your ass at the last minute. It actually speaks to a less professional atmosphere - where certain situations could have been avoided with better planning.

While Tony K. is quick to boast about Midtown Monthly, he's as quick to lay a dig into the Sacramento News & Review in the linked Yelp review. He criticizes the writers for involving themselves far too much in the stories and for being far too happy about what they produce.

"The problem with the Sacramento News and Review (besides it being a chain newspaper spread thin) is that it tries way too hard to be witty, snarky and edgy," King wrote. "Of course in doing so, the SN&R actually comes across as clueless, hollow and self-congratulatory."

The less first-person, the better. Too often, first-person articles put a reader further at a distance from the subject. They show how a simple reporter can be so close to someone who is newsworthy. It's supposed to propagate a sort of window to another person's life. Sometimes the perspective works, more often, I'm left thinking the article could have done without it. The perspective might be besides the point. I think Tony K. just doesn't like Sacramento News & Review Associate Arts Editor Josh Fernandez. He references him and his articles.

Tony K. doesn't stop with Fernandez. He hates the centerpiece designs, hates the feature subjects, hates the review section and hates the SAMMIES. (At least someone else thought that burrito feature was a bad idea.) He even makes an attempt to equate the newspaper to Starbucks. Sorry, three newspapers does not make a chain, a gaggle or a murder. Maybe he forgot that Midtown Monthly and Capitol Weekly are owned by the same company. I think.

The focus of Miller's fury launches some valid points, but he might be the wrong person to back them. Producing a weekly is more difficult than producing a monthly, and again, don't criticize self-congratulations when you are so quick to do it of yourself. If he were in a comparable position, working at a weekly, maybe his opinion would carry more weight. It's tough to tell whether he's been in Miller's position - the position of an editor at a weekly.

Foster stops by the comment section to point out "the whole 'competition' bit gets really old." I couldn't agree more. He is super even-tempered and brings about some solid points, after apologizing for the so-called free agent. Foster writes: "People piss on SNR because they expect more from it, or remember it a different way. they piss on it because they care." This is important. People spewing vile because they've seen better from SN&R and they'd wish it provided a better counterpart to the The Sacramento Bee.

And yes, I recognize many other people are just as angry with The Sacramento Bee and rightfully criticize the declining story production.

Miller goes off in the comment section, and its great. Each side volleys good arguments. I'd kind of like to meet Foster. I think Miller's the kind of guy who'll pound a couple of shots and then ask what you're having.

A truce was called without Miller going on as much of an attack as King.

He simply phoned Foster and hashed everything out.

Everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?

Alas, the flame war was put out.

(Side note: I'm pretty surprised by the amount of reviews of Midtown Monthly posted in August. There are 11 reviews this month. Someone must be e-mailing friends and telling them to battle. SN&R has six reviews this month too, with most of them following King's attack.)

Yes, he's alive. And in perfect hibernation.

Sorry to my readers for being away for a couple days.

Hello?

Is anyone there?

OK. There aren't many people checking out my blog, yet.

Maybe my friends will come around, probably not.

I was pretty tired after work the last couple of days and its sometime hard to think of quick shorts to write. It seems every idea I note takes too much time to prepare in one day. I'll do my best to come up with content during the weekend. I do intend to post, at minimum, daily

My boss sent me a popular link for local bloggers. A Web analyst from Propser Media launched local blog aggregator RiverWrap.com in June.

21Q interviewed Zach Melchori two months ago. Melchori told the blog that he wants to "drive more dialogue" in the city. Blogs are pulled from local writers and national writers blogging about Sacramento.




Read "RiverWrap blog feed covers Sacramento" for more information.

The concept is simple and a good starting point to find other popular, local blogs. You need somewhere to find blogs to add to your RSS feed.

And, yes, I'm submitting my blog.

On the horizon: I still plan to critique seven consecutive issues of new The Sacramento Bee. I forgot to pick up the last Saturday issue. I'll write my first post starting Tuesday. Also, I'll launch a weekly feature called MySpace Monday, where'll I'll give tips on how journalists can use MySpace for researching and reporting. Facebook Friday is not currently in the works.

Link: --31-- is the new 21

I'm going to keep it short today.

Editor & Publisher is launching a new blog about "how younger journalists can shape the future of news and storytelling." Maegan Carberry, a multimedia consultant who has worked as chief of staff for The Huffington Post, will write the blog. Her other work can be read here.

Read "Introducing a New 'E&P' Feature on the New 'New Journalism'" to learn more about the new feature.

Now, let's see if we can't figure out what you are, my little friend

I had been thinking about starting a blog for a while now.

I've long wondered, why do people choose to write a blog? What's the compulsion to keep writing despite few prospects that the writing will lead to pay?

(Side: am I too focused on being paid for work? If writing is my skill, is it too much to ask to be paid for it?)

How many bloggers expect people other than friends to read what they write? How do these bloggers deal with the vitriol written in the comment sections of the Web - the bathroom walls of our generation?

Blogging, I think, is an intentionally selfish pleasure. You intend to write for yourself and you write in the hope that you will gather a following.

More than anything — meaning, more than simply sitting somewhere and trying to think why people blog — I learned a lot about blogging from a piece in The New York Times Magazine.

Click here to read "Exposed" by Emily Gould.

Gould, a former Gawker blogger, started her writing career as a self-published blogger at self-titled Emily Magazine. She says she felt a connection with the people who read her blogs and left comments. "As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important," Gould writes. The community was important.

Blogging is equal parts sanctuary and public square. Gould says that she thought blogging provided an outlet to write whatever she wanted to write, and that she felt a right to say it - no matter how private the situations that inspired the writing. In spite of this, Gould writes about how her willingness to share is as thrilling as it is scary when people find her blog.

Gould equates blogging to an open house where strangers can look in. She believes that people blog because they like the idea that a record of their lives is being kept somewhere. People "can check in on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think."

(Side: We really need to work on different nouns, verbs and adjectives for the word “blog.” It shouldn’t make sense to say, “I blogged on my blog about blogging.” This, of course, being the subject of this blog.)

It's funny. Whenever I hear a name, I imagine all the places I can search for information about the person behind the name. Google. MySpace. FaceBook. LinkedIn. Yelp. Blogspot. Sacramento County Court Index. I can learn more about a person than they would likely share on a first date or from a first-encounter.

And that funny thing is, if I somehow did this before I met someone, wouldn't they be caught off-guard if I said, "So I see you're a fan of Radiohead?" In this digitally-intertwined generation, face-to-face dialogue is awkward and stilted if the information doesn't come from the same conversation. The mention of something freely given on Web is uncomfortable.

Gould gets at this a bit. She digitally overshares and is called on it. She went so far as to have a separate blog while at Gawker so that she could write personal content. Oversharing is the summation of inspiration and compulsion. Gould cites these as the two ends of the "will to blog" spectrum. See something. Blog. Think something. Blog. The persistent need to blog, and the feeling that the blog is important, leads to oversharing.

The article is interesting in that the reader sees when blogging goes bad. Blogging is so impulsive, yet that same impulsivity can be so bad. While it seems somewhat counterintuitive to blogging, I plan to do a fair amount of sketching before I blog. I feel uncomfortable at the thought of not attempting some level of depth and analysis.

I'm blogging to get back into the grind of writing. Too often, I have said, "that would make a good SNL skit" or "that would be funny to hear on a radio show." I need to blog, for no other reason, at least, to flesh out some of my ideas. If I get feedback, awesome; if not, it would be no different my dormant LiveJournal.

I don't kid myself. I don't expect to gather much of a following. My blog will be an exercise and I hope to improve my writing and criticism. I don't plan to cover too much personal information and I will seriously choose my spots in what I write. I'll keep my comments to a minimum regarding my current job and the same can be said of any place I will/could apply.

I intend to focus on what I know about journalism and plan to criticize local and national media. I have some rough thoughts about my next couple of blogs and it’ll be interesting to see what I come up with.

Thus begins my blog.