Myth: That all reporters and writers are fabulous and lead fabulously interesting lives.
Truth: They’re pretty ordinary.
Nowhere was this more evidenced than at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies annual media conference held last weekend in San Francisco.
In a historic-looking church on Franklin Street, a hundred-or-so writers, editors and miscellanies, sat around and talked about, among other things, “the end of the paper trail,” “using public records,” and things that “just don’t look right,” handily referred to as JDLR, with the “D,” morphing into the handiest tense, i.e., don’t, didn’t doesn’t, etc.
One thing that JDLR was the collection of oddballs cloistered in a drab, tired, ’70s-style conference room, looking equally drab and tired. Of course, there were the typical media-type stand-bys: the all-out news-nerd, the I-write-a-column fashionista, the bar-fly investigator and the local-politics junkie, but most of the journalists in the room were, quite frankly, normal looking.
They did normal things like fall asleep during lecture, drop their pens, stare into space, forget their umbrellas.
What did Lois Lane and Superman do to these poor people?
The fact is, reporters aren’t celebrities. They aren’t all fabulous and they don’t all lead fabulous lives.
Some are fabulous, some aren’t; some do lead fabulous lives, some don’t, just like any other profession except maybe cattle roping, which I’m pretty sure is the path least traveled to a glamorous life.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Fabulousness does not a good article make.
And backwards it almost, but doesn’t quite, make sense: ssensuolubaf. (It does comes dangerously close to “sense” with “sens” — think on that, dear reader.)
No lemon no melon!
