I Will Do Anything for Journalism, But I Won't Do That

As a curmudgeon who has embraced many of the new technologies of journalism, I want to draw a line.

Let’s quit tweet, tweet, tweeting like the birdbrains do. I don’t care what your friend had for lunch. I don’t care how many people are following you through Twitter.com. Or Facebook, for that matter.

My intelligence drops just about every time I see a tweet pop up on a web page I frequent.

I really like Missouri basketball player Kimmie English. He’s a bright, intelligent, witty kid. He speaks in complete sentences. He expresses opinions clearly in person and I suspect, if he were to compose a letter - that old fashion form of communication that required a three-day wait before the people you sent your thoughts to perceive them - then all the words would be spelled correctly and I wouldn’t feel like I was trying to decipher some personal license plate like 10SNE1.

But even Kimmie can do better than something I saw linked on a message board today:

"If ur a student at mizzou.. And walk around campus in Alabama, Oklahoma or duke shirts.. Transfer.. Plz.. It ruins my day walking to class."

I really don’t object to the message so much as the medium.

I contribute to a blog - this one, obviously - and I don’t pretend blogs are the classic form of journalism.

I also do video logs and I’ll admit I take great liberties with those. Hey, when you’re 59 years old, have a face made for radio, you do strange things in front of a video camera.

The intention of those vlogs, quite frankly, is to entertain and sometimes to unstuff those so full of themselves that it hurts.

For that I routinely draw accusations that I am a drunk, a meth addict, ugly, stupid, working out of my bedroom in a sweatshirt I haven’t changed in years. Only part of which is true. While I used to be a handsome young devil of a man, I no longer am. I cherish my good fortune that my wife still is willing to appear with me in public.

Hey, it is what gets me through the vlogs. And the blogs. And the game stories and the sidebars and the notebooks. You don’t get to write about Missouri proving everybody else wrong by ripping Illinois in football all that often. Too often, you’re writing about a game with Furman. Or any game involving the Royals. Or Chiefs. Or soccer. Or curling. Hey. I’ve written stories about curling.

Perhaps it is that I find myself in the clutches of the same economic downturns as the rest of you. A five percent pay cut, an involuntary one-week furlough without pay. Hey, if you are in the newspaper industry, you’re just lucky you haven’t been put out to pasture with a severance package that is generally insulting to anyone who has spent more than 20 years working at the same place.

But I draw the line at Twitter. Like the TV commerical notes: “Dad, I know you’re on the porch.”

Please, quit sharing the smallest detail of your daily travail. In the quickest, easiest, least fulfilling way.

I became a journalist because I love words. The way they can be used to paint an image, to link observation and explanation.

It is why I think it is wonderful to write about how some questions are so rambling that they climb the wall, scoot around a corner, take a stop in the men’s restroom, and only then arrive at their intended point.

You can’t do that with Twitter. You’re limited to 140 characters. And most people waste even those.

Tweet. Tweet-Tweet. Tweet-Tweet.

To paraphrase Meat Loaf. I will do anything for journalism, but I won’t do that.