{"id":596,"date":"2009-11-03T14:19:47","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T20:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=596"},"modified":"2009-11-03T18:49:05","modified_gmt":"2009-11-04T00:49:05","slug":"everlasting-cogstockers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=596","title":{"rendered":"Everlasting cogstockers."},"content":{"rendered":"

By way of Jimbo<\/a>, we learn that two WP <\/strong>employees, Henry Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia, had a bit of a disagreement over the merits of a story co-written by Roig-Franzia. The Honorable Mr. Roig-Franzia allegedly called the Honorable Mr. Allen a “c—sucker”, at which point the Honorable Mr. Allen allegedly attempted to give Roig-Franzia high cause to seek out a periodontal reconstructionist.<\/p>\n

This story has been covered here<\/a> and here<\/a>; in addition, Gene Weingarten of the WP<\/strong> (and a writer whose work I have a complicated relationship with) weighs in here<\/a>. It comes as no great shock that Weingarten weighs in on the side of<\/p>\n

Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I understand Weingarten’s point of view. I grew up on Mencken and Liebling. There’s a big part of me that supports the whole “Break it up, you two, we’ve got a newspaper to put out. You can settle down at the pub after deadline.” side to this story.<\/p>\n

But. I work for a company that’s close in size to the Washington Post empire. I’m pretty passionate about my job. I’ve had disagreements with people in other departments, too; disagreements that were serious enough for me to consider inviting them down into the parking lot for a frank and open exchange of views about the nature of the social contract. The key word there is “consider<\/strong>“.<\/p>\n

If I called one of my co-workers a “c—sucker” (or, for that matter, a “bony-a–ed b—h”) I would expect to be fired. I would consider myself lucky to get merely a serious reprimand from HR. If I took a swing at one of my co-workers, I would<\/strong> be fired. Our visions of Hildy Johnson aside, why should newspapers be any different from any other business?<\/p>\n

(I also wanted to call this out because Allen apparently called the story in question “the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years”, leading to much entertaining speculation about what the worst <\/strong>story was. The official answer appears to be something about Paul Robeson that was so error-ridden it was never printed. However, there’s lots of entertaining speculation at the links above, including multiple mentions of Sally Quinn.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By way of Jimbo, we learn that two WP employees, Henry Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia, had a bit of a disagreement over the merits of a story co-written by Roig-Franzia. The Honorable Mr. Roig-Franzia allegedly called the Honorable Mr. Allen a “c—sucker”, at which point the Honorable Mr. Allen allegedly attempted to give Roig-Franzia high […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":603,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions\/603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}