Tabloidification Of America Continues!
Welcome to the dark side. At the Washington Post, they’re working it from the inside out. Politico: Fists fly! It’s a case of Style section rage:
Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli found himself in the middle of an altercation Friday evening between Style reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia and editor Henry Allen, but will not say whether the two have been reprimanded by the paper.
…
Multiple Post sources independently confirmed to POLITICO that Roig-Franzia got hit while defending colleague Monica Hesse from harsh criticism leveled by her editor, Allen.
Allen, according to the Washingtonian, had told Hesse that a piece she had written was “the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years.”
Roig-Franzia, also working a story with Hesse that ran Saturday, told Allen not to be such a “c—sucker.”
Allen swung twice, with one punch hitting Roig-Franzia, according to sources. Next, staffers on the 4th floor —including Brauchli, whose office is temporarily across from the Style section — jumped in to break up the altercation.
Allen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor who already took a buyout, has just three weeks left on his contract, and was not in the office Monday. Roig-Franzia is in the office.
“C-sucker” … sounds like fighting words. A reporter who calls an editor that should be flogged. You don’t usually hear about that kind of thing coming out of the features department. And it sounds a little more like a tabloid newsroom than an august broadsheet, though even tabs have become sedate in recent decades, the suppression of office boozing limiting confrontations to the occasional shouting match and lemme-at-’im standoffs. And I’m sure that’s a good thing. Not like the old days, when a photog and a scribbler famously went to Downtown Crossing, the scribbler dressed in a Santa Claus suit for a holiday feature, they stopped in a bar enroute, one thing leads to another, and next thing you know, back in the newsroom, they’re hearing scanner chatter about a throng of horrified moms and tots watching Santa Claus and some scruffy wretch of a news photog pummel each other on Washington Street. As Allen tells Politico in an update:
In the old days, said the 68-year-old, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor, the press wouldn’t have been so shocked by an expletive-filled, newsroom scuffle.
…
“Back when I got into journalism, the idea that a fistfight in a newsroom would turn into a news story was unthinkable,” Allen said when reached Monday evening. “The guys in the sports department at the New York Daily News, they had so many, you wouldn’t even look up.”
So he is a tabloid man. God bless him. Meanwhile, “second worst story I’ve seen in Style in 43 years” is pretty specific. Knockdown drag-out details and what constituted the first and second worst Style stories in 43 years at Washington’s City Paper. The management geniuses at the Post apparently resolved the matter by banishing Allen, who has three weeks till retirement. No word on Roig-Franzia’s flogging. I guess it’s more of a last gasp than a new tabloid direction.
Malkin, cruelly: Remember that big Post frontpage about conservative incivility?
No clue on the politics of Roig-Franzia, though the potty mouth could suggest a leftward tilt, though Gateway’s groundbreaking research on lefty pottymouth is specific to public political discourse and not semi-private interpersonal relations. Allen, BTW, is a former Marine and Vietnam vet who says he last threw a punch at Parris Island in 1963. Last of the old breed!
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:56 am on Tuesday, November 3, 2009
3 Responses to “Tabloidification Of America Continues!”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
November 3rd, 2009 at 10:22 am
[...] UPDATE: Jules Crittenden [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:11 am
Here’s an old Marine who dedicated his life to journalism and has seen it go into the toilet. No wonder he took a swing.
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:05 pm
In the current newspaper environment, giving management a chance to fire you for cause, and not pay a buyout, or benefits, is world class stupid.