Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Flotsam and Jetsam / Mudville / Sports Why I won't tell Frank Sennett and Dan Sinker to kiss my ass
Posted by Ben Joravsky on 01.11.12 at 12:20 AM
I told him I don’t know how to tweet. And he told me, “No problem! I’ll type it as you say it.”
So what the hell, why not meet at Father & Son in Logan Square. Spend the first half eating the garlic chicken. Dang, that shit is good.
At halftime, Tal types the intro. “@joravben about to live tweet the Bulls game. Said, ‘Bet you lead’s down to eight at halftime’ ten minutes ago.”
By the way, at the time I made that prediction the Bulls were up by 20, so you might say we were off to a great start with the tweeting.
So then the second half starts and I’m just winging it, saying the first things that pop into my mind like: “Weak shit, GO STRONG.”
Cause as every Bull fan will tell you—Boozer is weak.
And....
I think all of Chicago agrees with me on that.
And....
“Terrible pass, Boozie. I don’t blame Jojo for being mad.”
Well, it was a bad pass.
And then the pièce de résistance, “What’s with the Ashton kutcher dude behind the Bulls bench?"
I mean, the dude was a dead ringer for Ashton.
And then I see Tal’s not typing anymore. He looks a little pale.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“We’re getting some criticism," he says.
“You’re kidding, you mean, there's actually people out there reading this shit?”
“Yes. Frank Sennett wrote, ‘Why is this weekly newspaper’s live feed randomly tweeting a Bulls game?'”
"Who’s Frank Sennett?"
"He’s the editor-in-chief of Time Out Chicago."
"Time Out Chicago? Is that rag still around?"
“Now Dan Sinker’s ripping you.”
“What did he write?”
“'OHMYGODYES,' responding to Sennett's tweet."
Then other people write in to say my tweeting sucks. Suddenly, this tweeting doesn’t look like the greatest idea.
We take a break to discuss.
Conversation goes a little like this…
Me: Tell Sennett to go fuck himself.
Tal: I don’t know about that.
Me: No, even better. Tweet to Sennett, “He can kiss one cheek,” and tweet Sinker to kiss the other. No, even better—tell them both to kiss my big Jewish ass. I’d bet they’d like that.
Tal: I don’t know.
Me: No, even better: Tell Sinker, “Hey, fucker, nice job closing the libraries.”
Tal: You can't call him fucker.
Me: But Rahm would.
Tal: Also, he’s not Emanuel. He’s just the guy who wrote the Emanuel twitter feed.
Me: Ah, fuck him anyway.
By now, it’s late in the fourth and we're ready to let it rip, when . . .
Get a call from legal. Tell them what I want to write. They tell me: "Ugh, Ben you might want to refrain from telling Dan Sinker and Frank Sennett to kiss your big Jewish ass."
“You think?”
“Yeah, maybe so.”
All right. I won’t tell Frank Sennett and Dan Sinker to kiss my big Jewish ass.
In fact, I’ll be magnanimous. Thank you, boys, for your constructive criticism.
But if you happen to be reading this—I’m bending over.
Comments (19)
Showing 1-19 of 19
Thanks for the explanation -- I thought I was having a stroke.
-- MrJM
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Ugh, why don't you just live-tweet on your own personal Twitter account? The Reader has 30,000 followers, and it sounds like you don't know what to do with them. In fact, by writing this blog post, you've just made it apparent that you don't know what you're doing. Congrats.
letting staff tweet for you is a slippery slope which can only dilute the distinctive Joravsky brand
Joravsky,
leave your journalistic and intellectual better Frank Sennett alone.
After all he is also a big time published book author and an authority on all things ethical and appropriate.
For example you may notice that the first review of his book "Finding Juliet" on Amazon is from one Heather Lalley. Heather may be better known now as Heather Sennett. Lalley was her maiden name.
http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Juliet-ebook/product-reviews/B002BNKOPK/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
Check out page two of the reviews where her review of his wonderful book was the first comment on that book.
Now kiss Sennett's ass Joravsky because he is your moral and intellectual better. Just ask him.
Nobody is seriously concerned about a do-gooder editor of a rag that makes RedEye look like real journalism? Sennett has never seen a white guilt topic he won't latch onto for page views or super hyper local twitter publicity.
And the other neck beard hipster dork. His time in the incredibly small spotlight expired months ago. He's about as relevant as a "Where's the Beef?" tag line.
good catch, marty.
I say let joravsky be joravsky. forget twitter -- dedicate your time to something useful.
"Sennett has never seen a white guilt topic he won't latch onto for page views or super hyper local twitter publicity. "
In spite of your discomfort, he does deserve some credit for going after Joe the Semi-Racist Cop on Chicago Now over that "ghetto shooting template" stuff while a certain "reporter" from out-of-town was acting as an apologist for him.
First off, if you look at my tweet, you'll see it was the mildest joshing in the history of the web. I took Ben's retort as being made in a similar spirit of good fun, which the Reader confirmed on Twitter the other day when I made sure to let the many nice people who rose to my defense there that the whole exchange was a joke. Again, I can't speak for Ben, obviously, but it seemed we were all having a laugh.
The only reason I'm dropping in here is to defend my wife's name from the anonymous "Marty4Medill." (Please note that I always use my real name for all comments online, and I think that's a standard all journalists should adhere to, M4M. I doubt you have the guts to put your full name to your attacks, but you should do so. It also sounds as if you know one or both of us personally, which makes your comment both sad and creepy.)
Anyway, Marty makes a sexist assumption I'd thought was outmoded by now. My wife in fact is widely known professionally as Heather Lalley. It's the name on her great book The Chicago Homegrown Cookbook, published last year, it was her byline for nearly a decade at the paper where she was a features reporter, it's on her Twitter account, etc. etc. It's the only name she's known by professionally. And using her name, yes, she posted a kind Amazon user review of her husband's self-published novel. Quite the ethical scandal, and I guess we should try to cover our tracks better next time...
I also don't think and have never claimed that I'm Ben's "moral and intellectual better." As I've said publicly on many an occasion, I admire his reporting and think he generally does a great job. Glad to put that on the record here, so Ben's live-tweeting adventure led to at least one positive outcome.
Also, thanks for the kind words FGFM. That was an incident in which my criticisms were deadly serious, and it'd be lovely if more people understood the distinction between that and lighthearted teasing.
Hey Frank this is a rhetorical response so please don't respond. Just obsessively tweet about it a few hundred times.
Nice move "attacking the messenger" in your response. I mean you manage both to admit to an ethical violation and simultaneously downplay it. The fact is it doesn't matter what name your wife used to review your book. She could have used Lalley, Smith, Dame Edna, or even Judge Sirica and the fact is still the same. Your wife gave a positive review of your book at a site dedicated to selling your book, without disclosing her relationship to you. Since both of you apparently masquerade as journalists you both deserve the vituperation. Or is it approbation in your mind?
Trying to obfuscate the issue by attacking Marty and accusing him of sexism just makes you look even more foolish. As for pseudoanonymity I suggest you check out Zorn's blog from a few days ago. You've heard of Zorn? He actually works for what remains of a once great newspaper. You are the main tour de ego behind a weekly that at best is a tree killing version of an online listings guide.
I guess the ferocity you display in your frequent battles with other journalists is inversely proportional to your role in real journalism.
I directly addressed the substance of a ridiculous attack and pointed out the hypocrisy of it coming from an anonymous troll, and now another one, undoubtedly a sock puppet for the first, makes even less sense. (I don't know anyone who considers an Amazon user comment an act of journalism, which is why they are marked quite separately from editorial reviews.) Any reasonable person will see that my exchange with Ben had absolutely no "ferocity" to it, and in fact in my comment I was genuinely complimentary to him. And yes, I do know, like and respect Zorn. I've also read his blog post on anonymous commenters. It has nothing to do with my assertion, which is widely supported within the profession, that it's unethical for _journalists_ to hide behind the cloak of anonymity in online forums. In fact, there are well-documented cases of unethical reporters being fired after they were discovered anonymously attacking their critics in such forums. It is a best professional practice for journalists to identify themselves when commenting online so other readers can "consider the source." I'm sure Ben is having a good chuckle watching me engage here. You win, brother.
Professor Sennett conducts an online lecture on ethics.
The Theme: What Happens on Amazon stays on Amazon.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
You need not worry your pretty little head about it though. Given where you work and the current state of American journalism I'm sure this ethical trifle on your part will be forgotten and ignored.
Now if you worked at the NYT or another real news source and this were a decade ago the outcome might be different.
It takes a lot of hypocrisy to go after a guy's family for a trumped-up ethical infraction based around anonymity when you yourself are leaving an annymous comment. -Scott Smith, @ourmaninchicago
Wow, Scott Smith has joined the discussion. Are there any other former colleagues of Professor Sennett here? Please jump in quickly as the online clown car of Chicago journalism is getting crowded.
Regarding my anonymity if it was good enough for Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Papers it's good enough for me. Perhaps a lawsuit could be instituted to try to find out my identity. Please don't throw me in the briar patch!
Scott, look up the definition of the phrase "trumped up". Now you may believe that the Amazon comment is meaningless, but it's not "trumped up". On a Chicago journalistic scandal scale of one to ten, with one being a kerfuffle and ten being Bob Greene and the high school student, this issue is far closer to a ONE than a Ten. That being said it isn't "NOTHING".
Now when I posted the comment I counted on Frank Sennett going into attack mode. He didn't disappoint. Over the four or five years that Frank has been back in Chicago I have watched him attack other journalists for their alleged shortcomings and as my Albanian ancestors might say "What goes around comes around, now pass the coffee."
The two incidents that come first to my mind are his battle with Michael Miner here at the Reader and during his manic twitter attacks during the Joe the Cop imbroglio he suggested that a reporter for "The Chicago Reporter" was insensitive to issues of race. I'm being way too kind by using the word insensitive.
Now if Time Out Chicago lasts for one hundred years the sum total of the good it will have done will be less than the worst single issue of The Chicago Reporter.
I'll leave it at that. Now I'm going to give Frank and his supporters some advice here. Don't respond to this. Let this blogpost pass from the online colon of the Reader into the anus of the Reader and then be passed off into the atmosphere as just so much gas.
Keeping it going only increases the likelihood that someone with a bigger forum will pick up on it and continue the online skewering of Professor Sennett.
As I suspected, this is about Joe the Cop. He was obsessed with me for several months after the incident in question, long after everyone else had moved on. I'd bet money this troll is Joe himself; absent any other evidence, that's what we should conclude.
Glad to take the opportunity on MLK Jr. Day to say I'm proud to have called out a racist cop, who was not and is not a journalist, and I'm proud that my comments led the Tribune Company to take away the forum they provided for his racism. It's unfortunate that his friend, and I do mean personal friend, from the Chicago Reporter tarnished the institution she works for to defend Joe's racism with the statement that everyone's a racist, so who cares, really.
People did care, as it turns out, and Joe's racism is no longer welcome in polite Chicago media circles. I'm pretty sure most fans of the Chicago Reader would be just as uncomfortable with Joe's hateful rant against a young black man who was shot to death by the Chicago police, which included the statement that he was worth more dead than alive. Time to move on, Joe, and go back to policing your jurisdiction out in the suburbs; this is old news and everyone but you is long past it. Now that I know for sure where the malice is coming from, I'm done engaging with it here.
Again, nothing but respect for Ben Joravsky, to reiterate that salient point.
Frankie,
I'm not Joe the Cop. I'm Chuckles the Chicagomediaphile.
I did read Joe's blog though and it continued well after you went after him. My memory is the Tribsters removed that one post and that was it.
I do follow him on twitter though and I do generally like his point of view.
I also didn't appreciate you going after Michael Miner who I've been reading since the Reader first appeared.
Your attack on the young Chicago Reporter journalist was uncalled for. As for obsession considering the number of times you tweeted regarding Joe the Cop I think you are an expert on it. What was it? 100? 200? I forget.
I did tweet Joe the Cop regarding your latest comment to give him a heads up.
Hopefully, unlike you and me he will have the sense to not comment.
Now I don't have a legal department to ask if I should tell you to kiss my Balkan ass, so I won't.
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