copyfire.com Blog

I am pleased and somewhat disturbed to announce that readers can now follow this blog on Twitter, if they’re so inclined. I say disturbed, because I truly have no idea where Twitter has to go at this point. It’s almost to the point where I can’t help feeling it’s jumped the shark, if you will. I mean, Senator McCain is, um…tweeting. Which I’m not sure about on a couple of levels. One, he is a very, very old person, so you know something’s reached critical mass when old white men in Washington are using it, and two, because the word “tweet” when used in this form causes me to wrinkle my nose in distaste for reasons I cannot quite explain.

Anyway, if you want to follow CopyFire, request to follow and I’ll add you ASAP, cross my heart. It’s a locked account, so only the special people like you get to read it, you lucky, lucky person!

Over the last month, several articles have mentioned that Quincy Jones, the acclaimed musician and producer, is lobbying President Obama to create a minister of culture or secretary of the arts position in his administration. And why not? In recent years, it certainly feels like arts and culture have been pushed to the side. The arts form part of the backbone of this country, and provide a massive tax base that pays for all sorts of federal projects. Maybe it’s time to give this important part of our collective and distinctly American culture a national voice. This country invented jazz, for crying out loud. Jazz, of course, being Jones’ life-long passion and what gave him his start back in the be-boppin’ 1950s.

According to “Q” (his favored nickname), we’re the only industrialized country that doesn’t have some sort of cabinet-level arts position. That seems impossible, but it’s true. With all the money that was slashed from the NEA (National Endowment of the Arts) back in the mid-90s thanks to Newt and Co. and a couple of bad PR moves (And no, it hasn’t really gotten better since then. Although a lot of people think the subsequent “raises” given to the NEA in the last few years has healed some of the damage, it absolutely has not.), hasn’t the time come, in this new administration, to give the arts some sort of advocate in D.C., someone who may even be able to, I don’t know, occasionally have coffee and a chat with the President?

Anyway, an ingenious soul set up an online position directed at President Obama to ask that this new arts position be created. If you feel strongly as well, go on and sign it.

This weekend, I attended an event sponsored by the Cleveland chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, primarily aimed at those who are seeking to transition their careers from print journalism to other types of writing. I was invited by John Ettorre, the well-known Cleveland writer & blogger extraordinaire. It was a good experience, and the turnout was great, especially considering the terrible road conditions. There was plenty of great information shared, and was I’m sure especially helpful for those who weren’t already involved in new media, such as blogs or other forms of online communication. But I have to say, one of the saddest things about Saturday (besides the fact that so many people there were either hanging on by a thread to their jobs, or had already been laid off) was really understanding that print newspapers truly are going away. I mean, I’ve been reading the newspaper since I was 8 or 9, and once I discovered Mitch Albom’s articles in the Detroit Free Press, it was all over for me. I read it before school every day. I would eat breakfast at the counter in our kitchen, bowl of cereal in front of me, slurping up milk, and reading Mitch. His series of articles on the Secret World Series during the MLB strike of 1994 was a classic, whether or not you like him and his tear-jerky books aside.

Another disturbing issue brought to my attention during the workshop was raised by Mary Ann Sharkey, the famed Ohio journalist, wgucg was this: If print journalism goes away, or newspaper-style investigative journalism in general, then who’s going to cover the local issues? I mean, it’s not like the local television stations do a good job of this. If you want sensationalism, and dumb teaser commercials, that’s the place to go now. It’s all about ratings, which I suppose can’t be helped. But I cannot tell you the last time I watched the local news. For that type of information, I turn to either the Plain Dealer or Cleveland.com. I’m not going to pretend that I like the PD, because I don’t. Growing up with the Free Press, I’m sorry, it’s a poor relation. Part of the problem may have to do with the fact that it has no competition, and hasn’t for years. But I digress. If I want local, I still go to the PD. If that goes away, and is replaced by (mainly biased) “citizen journalists” and their blogs (and don’t get me wrong — there are some great ones, but the web is so cluttered and over-opinionated at this point, who has the time to find them?), with no training and no sense of what it means to be a journalist (which I decidedly AM NOT, but then again, I don’t profess to be), what happens? Worse, I feel like people my age, the Gen Xers & Gen Yers, are just not as cognizant of or interested in local news, anyway. We were brought up on the 24-hour news cycle of CNN & and MSNBC (and — UGH — Fox), and their online counterparts. Local news barely registers to a lot of the people in my age cohort. So then what? Does local news stop getting coverage if no one seems to care? And I don’t mean human interest, but City Hall. The school boards. The city councils. Corruption has always plagued the offices of big cities, but if no one’s covering it, it’s only going to get worse. Can you imagine? Growing up just outside of Detroit, I was more than aware of “King” Coleman Young and recently Kwame “Big Dumb” Kilpatrick’s reigns of corruption. And do you know what brought “Big Dumb” down, finally? Local journalism. The Detroit Free Press making a big, big stink until they got the documents they wanted.

Sorry for the rant. But a world without real news journalism, and without people who know enough to care about it, is a scary world, indeed.

The 1/6/09 Examiner features a short blog post by Ronald Holden, the famed food writer and blogger, and founder of Cornichon.org. Holden begins the article by writing about the recent Wall Street Journal article on the best and worst jobs in the United States, and wonders why food critic isn’t one of them. I have to agree with him there. If I wasn’t a quasi-vegetarian, and therefore willing to eat a much wider range of foods, that would definitely be a the top of my list of dream jobs (as an aside, though, if anyone out there IS willing to hire a veggie food writer, please shoot me an email — I am all over it).

Towards the end of his blog, Holden mentions an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times by Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, and I thought it important to give that op-ed as much publicity as possible. Berry writes about the need for something he’s calling a 50-year farm bill, explaining essentially that with all the rush to “green” this and “eco” that, somehow it’s become lost in the mix that our greatest natural resource, soil, is in great danger of going the way of the dinosaur, due to the great amount of abuse it’s subject to on a regular basis. He goes on to remind us that soil is non-renewable, and there is no amount of money in the form of government subsudies to agri-business giants or otherwise that will allow more food to be grown or raised, because once the soil is dead, it’s dead. His suggestion to make sure that doesn’t happen is a farming practice called perennialization, a form of crop rotation, and a 50-year farm bill “that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.”

In other words, ya’ll, if we want to keep eating, we better start paying more attention to where our food comes from, who’s making it, and exactly how it’s made or grown. It could be as simple as eating more certified organic produce, or buying more locally, but regardless, we’re all going to have to do our part. I’d hate to have to live on those weird freeze-dried astronaut meals when I’m in my golden years, and I think you would, too.