Unsolicited advice: Don't offer unsolicited advice | MARK HUGHES COBB
It's no secret to anyone who reads newspapers — meta ref for you, up top — that traditional print media is struggling.
Not just because of the Internet, but yes, basically because the entirely free flow of information is neither entirely free nor often factually informative, and sure, because people like stuff sans cost, even if it's bizarrely, stupidly wrong and misleading.
What happened to the guy who sang all I want is some truth; just give me some truth? Oh yeah, murdered in a hail of bullets.
The economic ups and downs of the country don't help, as when business is slow, bad, or nearly non-existent, thank you pandammit, folks don't advertise as much, despite the fact that one truth of capitalism is you must sow in order to reap.
No, panic's sphincter slams tight with bad news on the doorstep. Not only have major and minor papers folded — which, though it's a pun, isn't really funny anymore — but others have cut back, cut down, trimmed staff, lost editions, lost or cut way back on print, scaled down the size of pages, and so forth and so on into obscurity and beyond.
Though we are still in print, unlike many, and producing reams of pages and online content every day, The Tuscaloosa News has not been immune. When the New York Times Regional Media Group built our four-story building about 20 years ago, the big black-and-white-and-once-read-all-over construction across from what was once Stallworth Lake, then landfills, then baseball fields, then field-fields, then 30-foot-pylons burrowing past trapped methane to support the Amphitheater, it was a $30 million investment, roughly $10 million of which was our gorgeous Heidelberg press.
When we lost that massive, rumbling, complex apparatus, it felt like having a tooth pulled sans anesthesia. Walking the gap now makes me fear the reality of ghosts.
More from Mark Hughes Cobb: Something's actually happening, Reg! Time to leave the silos
Don't misunderstand, I'm thrilled the Saban Center, with its focus on education, on the future, is moving to this site. My preference was for a bowling alley, indie theater and indoor lap pool across our expansive basement, but I suppose that the children still are our future, thank you Sexual Chocolate, and it's got to be a more progressive enrichment than another hotel or apartment megaplex.
There's a phenomena known as mansplaining, whereby an arrogant speaker assumes everyone he's blustering around is, well, stupid.
Stolen joke: Where does a mansplainer get his water? From a well, actually ....
I'm a recovering mansplainer, though I come by it honestly. Ever since my two-years-older brother taught me to read, I've been a seeker. Sometimes the info boils out, as when a 5-year-old tries to explain a movie: Not necessarily in compact form, certainly not in chronological order, and perhaps entirely nonsensically, at least until rewrites.
Honestly, though, feel free to Steve Martin in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" me when I start rolling like Del (the late great John Candy): "The last thing I want to be remembered as is an annoying blabbermouth .... You know, nothing grinds my gears worse than some chowderhead who doesn't know when to keep his big trap shut .... If you catch me running off at the mouth, just give me a poke in the chops...."
But it's not only males who feel comfortable telling me the place where I work, and have for more than three decades now, isn't local. Folks have been sputtering this at least since the NYT group bought The Tuscaloosa News, back in the mid-'80s.
A few origins have been suggested for the rhetorical "What am I, chopped liver?" One is that liver has traditionally been a side, not a main, and can thus be easily overlooked.
Another is that, when cooking chicken, for example, the giblets — liver, heart, gizzard, neck, which I'm thinking would be a great alt-country-rock band name, one of those with at least two mandolins, and a lot of "Hey! Ho!" in the lyrics — often get thrown out, cast into the yard, to be eaten by lesser animals. Such as chickens.
Note to self: Screenplay for "The Rooster Also Rises," with its heinous neck-twist at the end: "Soylent Giblets are poultryyyyyyyy!," howled by a grimacing Chick Heston.
When I wryly point out that I am indeed local, then comes the skidding backtrack: "Oh, but we like (read, remember, don't hate) YOU!" Wow, is that one tone-deaf response just after you've spat in my face.
Few of these even mostly smart folks realize we have always run stories by other writers, papers and services, as even at our finest depth, breadth and height, in the NYT-backed '80s and '90s, with staffs, sections and words words words that stuffed our Sunday editions nearly as giblet-full as our parent company's, we did not have the resources to place employees in D.C., Paris, Coker, Buhl, Elrod or other exotic spots.
Unsolicited advice: Don't offer unsolicited advice.
Just as every soul living in Tuscaloosa saw the Police at the Bama — remarkable, given there were maybe 100 of us actually there — everyone with advice once worked at their college paper, or wrote for the something back in the wayback during the upside down.
Listening, somewhat patiently, is one of those things we do. What else can we offer that blog-ish sites, and that-wacky-uncle's-email-forwards can't?
Depth? Accuracy? Accountability?
I promise you no one loves the unplumbable fathoms of the WWW more than I. For years, editors have striven, mostly in vain, to curb my ... loghorrea, graphomania, hypergraphia ... see what I mean? Few can devote the time I find for obituaries, reviews and other long features. That's just not everyone's mission.
Accuracy concerns me when even Sports Illustrated gets numbers wrong in a story about our City Council passing alcohol licensing for Bryant-Denny Stadium concessionaires, or when I see well-known names spelled wrong — Nick Del Gatto was our local legend; Nick Delgado is some kind of health guru — or lesser-known names, for that matter, when the info's at our fingertips, for which, OK, thank you Internet.
Sure, with smaller staffs, in rushed deadlines, we still mess up, time to time. That's where accountability comes in. If we don't have it all just right, right now, we'll make up for it quickly as possible after.
Because the 21st century's free-flow-chaos has left publishers scrambling, various edicts have been handed down to we boots on the ground over what must be done to save the day: Bullet points! Depth! Video! Podcasts! Blogs! Vlogs!
I don't blame those wishing for magic. It's like assembling a set list for a crowd you don't know. Even if I recognize a face or three, I'm not conversant with everyone's tastes or current moods. Assuming I did, should I pander and cater, or try to lead?
Note to self: Panderbear Caterwauling, in case The Liver Heart Gizzard Neck burns out.
Do you commit top 40 at the open? Or something less-known, but with a slam-bang chorus, like The Decemberists' "Cavalry Captain"? Something finger-picker-y like Simon and Garfunkel's "America," that may not be on millennials' randomizer, but will pluck tenderly at the heartstrings of we elders? Or remain obscure because no one's listening until their second glass anyway, and even then only when it's "Something we know!"?
Sets I've been most pleased with tend to be those where folks are both listening and kinda not, hearing what they want, maybe making out what I'm striving for, and maybe just enjoying the effort, the atmosphere.
When I play solo, I'm dourly amusing, some have said. Between songs mostly, though my lyrics are littered with intentionally ear-snagging gags, like a dried tongue tasting like William Shatner's toupee. I patter. I blather. I let free form roam where it will, built around origin cues such as "Ouroboros of despair," "star-crossed circus geeks" and "Rilke's infinite continuous distances."
Does it connect? It depends on the connect-ee. All I know is all I know. And it's not all well, actually. But it's there for the wishing, and the wishers.
Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Unsolicited advice: Don't offer unsolicited advice | MARK HUGHES COBB
