Summer Camp, Post #12: A little explanation
I am sitting in my car, transcribing my interview with Elsinore. All of them were great guys, and what I saw of their show was really good too. The interview and everything else that I saw during the day will be posted in the morning (or tonight, if I have the energy).
I just wanted to make a little comment about journalism etiquette. When you are in a photo pit, with a press pass, you are not watching the show as a fan. You are instead watching it as a journalist. Yes, you are allowed to show interest, but you are not technically a member of the audience. This includes not doing anything the audience would do, such as catch things the band members throw out for the actual audience. As a journalist, or a member of the press, you are to remain neutral. You have given up your right as a member of the audience and must act like a professional. Nothing less should be expected.
It’s people like the ones I describe above that make having a press pass that less of a special thing. I had to struggle a bit to get these passes for an actual publication, which I thankfully did thanks to Jay Goldberg Events & Entertainment. But others were let in as well, and us in what I consider the real media are given a bad name by the actions of others. They make us all look bad, and it should not be tolerated. The press pass is a privilege, and it should be treated and honored as one.
That’s my view at least. It really was a good day.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
dude, i know this post is directed at me. just letting you know, i’m not an “actual” journalist or a member of the press or anything close to professional. i’m just a blogger going to a laid-back festival, having a good time. personally, when i’m enjoying a show, i’m not looking around making sure everyone in the pit is up to the same standards of professionalism as me. i followed the same three song / 25 minutes rule that everyone else did.
if you’re mad that I picked up ?uestlove’s drumstick that was laying directly in front of me, i don’t know what to say (what was I suppose to hand it back him?). half of the people in the pit during the roots didn’t have even press passes. at that point, we’re all just fans watching an awesome show.
differences aside though, i’ve been enjoying your summer camp coverage. if i run into you again i’ll make sure to keep my drumstick-grabbing tendencies in check.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
eric,
“real media”?? haha.
hahahaha.
ps. you sound like an asshole
May 29th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
I haven’t read any of your other stuff so I am not trying to pass comment on that, but what you have said here is almost complete nonsense. You can consider print and traditional media the ‘proper press’ all you please, but the rest of the world just doesn’t see it that way any more.
The Guardian, which is pretty much the world’s single most successful online news organisation, actually mimics how amateur journalists work in order to improve their own offering.
Loads of people in the amateur media are actually also employed in the ‘real media’ and simply use the amateur outlet as an opportunity to write more complete, less commercially-influenced work.
As a journalist reviewing or otherwise documenting a gig the idea that you have to remain neutral is just laughable. If you are acting as a critic your personal opinion is crucial. If you think music is reviewed on a purely objective basis I can’t imagine you are a very interesting music journalist.
I know I am not the journalist in question, but if anyone had told me that excessive enjoyment of the show was unprofessional and that you are supposed to watch these things with cool detachment I would have told them to fuck right off. What a lot of po-faced, tight-arsed old bollocks. This sort of sad, dingy attitude is exactly the reason people are embracing new media. Why would you want to read about something that is supposed to be enjoyable, when the article has been written by someone with such an obvious and enormous gherkin up their backside.
Oh, and in the ‘real media’ you don’t tend to see clumsy constructions like this: “It’s people like the ones I describe above that make having a press pass that less of a special thing”. That’s just personal sniping and not especially relevant to the point you are trying to make, but you don’t get to play the ‘professionalism’ and ‘real media’ cards if your basic ability to construct a sentence in English is not as good as many amateur journalists.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
If you for one minute actually believe that having a press pass at an event like the one you attended is supposed to be a “special thing”, that it is meant to elicit some kind of special decorum from its holders, you’ve picked the wrong line of work. With this entry, you’ve successfully managed to over-inflate the value of both yourself and of the pass itself. Congratulations.
The exact opposite is true: you’re supposed to be just like everyone else attending the show, making observations and translating them into print. Sometimes you get caught up in what is happening.
Would you offer this same advice to a war correspondent trapped inside an active military zone? Would you suggest to such a reporter to believe that they’re better than everyone else around them — more important people who are being firebombed and shot towards?
You should try loosening your shirt collar a bit. I can see that it gets stuffy way up there in the country club of your mind. Clearly, you have a misguided concept of what “the real media” actually is, your own role in it or of what a “press pass” actually represents. Behave the way you want to, but don’t waste your time (or ours) assessing the behaviors of other writers.
At the end of the day, Taylor catching a drumstick isn’t the real news — to him or to anyone else. If you’re more concerned with that event than you are with the festival you’re attending, whatever coverage you’ve generated must be a tremendous let-down to your readers.
June 1st, 2008 at 2:39 pm
As a former music editor of the top-ranked college paper in the country, blogs have a much more dedicated audience and bloggers, the more enthusiastic the better, have every right to be at a show. Mr. Heisig sounds a little bitter.
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I’m glad that I’m not a journalist then, Eric. I wouldn’t be able to pick up a drumstick, snatch the setlist or do shots with the band backstage.
“I don’t get any satisfaction out of the old traditional journalist’s view— ‘I just covered the story. I just gave it a balanced view…” Hunter S. Thompson, in an interview for the online edition of The Atlantic.
Thompson, in a 1974 Interview in Playboy Magazine: “…I almost never try to reconstruct a story. They’re both much better reporters than I am, but then, I don’t think of myself as a reporter.”
“If I’d written the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
—Thompson, Rolling Stone, February 15, 1973