tony pierce.com + mary!
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   Thursday, September 12, 2002  
dear LA Times,

hi. you suck.

today you had a los angeles staff writer try to educate your readers on the phenomenon of Blogs.

your writer did a shitty ass job. nothing new for your paper. but today it's my turn to tell you how bad you are.

let's see if i can do this in 5 minutes, which, i imagine is how long it took your paper to throw together this mess.

okay, you write about Blogs, you're a paper in LA, you assign it to an LA writer, you interview several alleged bloggers and let me guess how many LA bloggers you interview or write about?

how about none.

instead of interviewing actual LA Bloggers, 200 of whom could have been found via LABlogs.com (#1 google result when you type in "los angeles blogs", rocket science, i know.), you choose to interview former LA Times journalist ::cough::lazyjournalism::cough:: Larry Pryor who is the director of the Annenberg Online Program at USC.

fair enough, but where's Larry's blog? oh that's right, he doesnt have one.

onlinejournalism.com, which the Annenberg students churn out is beautiful, but who reads it? no one. why? because look at the softball old "news" OJR gives us today (Yahoo went grey yesterday ... oooooh -- thanks for telling us today) the LA Times interviewed the Managing Editor of it Melissa Milios, a graduate student, but where's her personal blog? the LA Times shows a peppy picture of Annenberg's Joshua Fouts but where's his blog "Dangerous Monkey"?

oh, it's gone.

Is this a matter of those who can't do, teaching?

never.

people do read matt welch, and ken layne, and emmanuelle, and heather and moxie, and laura crane, and ben sullivan and his sister kate sullivan, and greg and molli, the mighty mc brown, hollywood producer brian linse, and even a slick motherfucker named pierce whose site got 752,009 hits last month (down from 906,344 in July).

and how can you forget LAExaminer.com which is a Blog that focuses on the ineptness of the LA Times?

why would you dare to be interesting?

we live in LA. we blog. many times a day do we blog. some of the above, most on my lil list, are even paid journalists.

why not ask paid journalists, not teachers of a crappy ass (but pretty) quasi-blog, if blogging is journalism. that is, if you want to keep asking the same dull questions about this phenomenon repeatedly like an entertainment writer sitting down with Mick Jagger and asking, "so how did you and Keith meet?"

heres some other ways to write a shitty peice of dreck that exposes you as the dinosaur that you are:

+ call Slashdot a blog.

+ use the word "blog-o-sphere" a half dozen times in the first few paragraphs and not give credit to The Daily Pundit who coined the phrase "blogopshere", but use him in the article anyway.

+ by all means reference that tech guru William Safire's column about the word "Blog" in the NYT

+ talk about the class at Berkeley that will be all about Blogging

+ dont talk about the inventor of the Blogger, Ev, who has a great blog

+ ignore the Blogfather Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit who got 200,000 hits yesterday

+ and when you put it online, make sure not to link to anyone

LA Times, you will go down.

I cannot wait for that day to come.

Will it be by your own hands or at the hands of others is anyone's guess.

But keep shooting yourselves in the foot by this sort of sloppy reporting and your enemies and critics will just have to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

and the bloggers will type it all up.

the Blogger phenomenon is happening stronger in Los Angeles than in any other city in the world and you wouldnt know it if it slapped you in the face. by the way, im slapping you in the face.

meanwhile you're nothing more than a formerly beautiful woman, who is now showing her age and trying to hide the bags under her eyes as her boutique-bought hat sags along with the rest of her as she slouches towards irrelevance.

all the botox redesign will not help you.

the only thing that will help, im sorry to say, is to start hiring us.

and pay us loads and loads and loads of cash.

although most of us will work for just loads.

::update:: professional journalist and los angeles blogger Matt Welch handles this subject much more delicately in this new post, and doesnt once use the word motherfucker.

show off.


Previously on busblog...