If you want some fodder for your speculation about why The Fresno Bee is such a lousy paper, reporter and columnist Mike Osegueda is dishing it up over at my brother’s blog. It started with on argument about Twitter, on Twitter, and how to use it. Here are some tidbits from a comment by Osegueda:
[N]ot following someone who follows you is like them reaching out to shake your hand and you just looking at it. . . . You might think it’s disingenuous, but to me it’s like telling people “have a nice day” at the end of a phone conversation. Is me saying that really going to change their day? No. But it’s nice. I think being nice is nice.
That’s a flawed metaphor. Twitter is not like a civilized cocktail party where people come up to you, introduce themselves, and initiate a well-structured conversation about an important issue. And it’s not like a telephone conversation, either. It’s more like a big, noisy plaza with a wide variety of people, where you can wander freely and listen or yammer as you please. As I pointed out in the same comment thread, “If you want courtesy or structure or civility, you go to a moderated blog, a private discussion group, or a lecture series, not Twitter, which is just a big noisy room.”
Why should I follow everybody who follows me on Twitter? They’ll just fill my timeline with a bunch of crap that I’ll have to scroll through to find the stuff I really want to read. If I want to check up on them, I’ll go to their Twitter page and read it there. It’s not about being “nice”; it’s about controlling the flow of information, which, with Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader, can be like drinking from a fire hose. If you want me to follow you on Twitter, then you need to be saying interesting things no more than a few times a day and I need to feel that I should prioritize your tweets over those of others.
What comes through clearly from Osegueda is that he really doesn’t care about substance on Twitter. It’s just personality and convention. And that tells me a lot about his outlook, which no doubt affects what he does at the Bee, and the quality of what happens there. Take a look at how he decides who to follow:
When a biz/org/etc follows me, the first thing I look at is how many people they follow. If they don’t follow anyone that says to me — and to others, from things I’ve read — is that they’re only interested in a one-way conversation. That’s high on my list of Twitter faux paus[.]
Which, again, is just personality and convention overcoming substance. He is evaluating people’s Twitter feeds based not on what they are saying, or even on who they are reading, but on how many people they are reading. (And what if all those people they follow no longer show up on Twitter? Does he vet them all individually to make sure they are still posting, so he knows that his metric actually means something? I doubt it.) That’s sort of like saying, “I don’t care what you have to say unless I know that your Twitter timeline has the potential to be filled with lots and lots of tweets from a bunch of other people, many of whom are complete strangers to me.” Say goodbye to substance or thoughtfulness.
Is this how they do things at the Bee? Or is Osegueda just an outlier? Given what I read in the paper every morning, I’m inclined to say its the former; they really aren’t interested in wit, delightful writing, interesting stories, useful investigation, or anything but keeping themselves employed. So I was also not surprised to see the next comment from Osegueda:
If you’re interested in building a bigger base of followers, which if you’re marketing something, you oughta be — then this is a good way to try to engage new people. If your strategy is for people to come to you, that’s fine too. To me, that’s kinda like opening a business and not putting a sign up or advertising or whatever.
That raises kind of a complex issue. There are lots of people who use Twitter to promote their business, their campaign, their cause, or whatever. The business, campaign, or cause exists independently of Twitter and whatever other means of promotion they use. Is that an acceptable use of Twitter? Sure. But is Osegueda talking about the same thing? He just wants a bigger base of followers, probably so he can funnel more people to the Bee‘s websites, where they are more likely to click on ads, make money for the Bee, and keep him employed. Which, if he would just admit it, is a decent line of work, I guess. But it’s only about half a step above “professional spammer,” in my opinion, because, as I suggested above, the lack of wit, delightful writing, interesting stories, and useful investigation in the stuff published by the Bee, including its blogs, means people are not really showing up because they appreciate what the Bee does. The Bee just has a monopoly on local news and wants to make sure it sucks up as many eyeballs for ads as it can. That’s not journalism; it’s just, well, spamming—churning out “content” to support ad revenue. Maybe that’s the way of the future. I’m sure Osegueda is all about that. But I like to read interesting stuff. The Bee is rarely interesting, but where else can I read local news?
And one more:
[N]ow that I know you’re not following our account and you only see Tweets if they mention you, then I might be less likely to RT your stuff, because I know you’re not going to return the favor.
Again, personality and convention defeat substance. Here Osegueda is saying, I don’t retweet things because they’re interesting and I want to share them, as a manifestation of my excitement about having learned something new or read something witty—no, I retweet things if I think it will do something for me.
If you want to use Twitter just for promotion, be my guest. But it makes you look like a jackass. Some of the best tweets I’ve read are just clever and witty. They aren’t promoting anything, but they keep me interested in the world because they’re imbued with real humanity. People like to know what other people think. Most of us like to say what we think. I write this blog, which is mostly just me saying what I think. Not many people read it regularly. (I know; I follow the stats.) But if you want to read it because you find it interesting, go right ahead. This isn’t a business and I’m not like the Bee, with a monopoly on local news.
So there you have it. I’m just speculating, of course, when I extend all this to why the Fresno Bee is such a lousy paper. But I don’t have the means to get in there behind closed doors, see what is going on, and figure out why nobody over there really seems interested in, excited by, or engaged with the real world. Maybe that’s a problem with all papers that have to print something every day. If so, I’d rather see less frequent publication coupled with a more interesting paper.
Peter:
First of all, it seemed like you thought everything I said was trying to convince YOU to follow people on Twitter. When I explicitly said right at the top of my comment: “Preface: As with the discussion on Twitter, I’ll say this applies to brands on Twitter who are trying to market themselves … So to be super clear, I’m talking why it’s effective for your event/blog/business/etc to follow people.”
For your personal account, by all means, follow what’s interesting to you. This conversation was about — at least to me — building a brand on Twitter. If you’re using Twitter as an information feed, that’s a totally different set of circumstances, as I explained right at the top.
I also like that your criticism of me begins around repeating what someone else said to me, then you attacking that logic as mine. Uhhh, no.
When I talk about judging branded accounts based on how many people they follow, I mean to evaluate how much they interact — again, as a brand. Yes, I use Twitter to promote things and get people to our Web site. I fully admitted that. But I also try to interact with people on a personal level and make it as authentic as possible.
There are a lot of lame spam accounts on Twitter that don’t interact. I try to interact with people on Twitter as much as possible because I think that’s what makes you not a spammer. I made that point, yet you turned it around on me and tried to say I believe in spamming. Actually, it’s the opposite. Fact of the matter is that I like FPQ as an evident and was just trying to offer honest advice as to how not to look like a spam account.
As for the part about RTing, I’ll admit that was a little unclear, but I was trying to give a hypothetical situation about community support. I tried to clear that up in a later comment. Point being: Community is built on people supporting each other. On The Beehive account, I try to RT events and info about the community — events, blog posts, news, etc. (Yes, they have to be interesting first). I happen to think it’s nice when I RT something from a local blog, and they RT something of mine. Is it a pre-requisite? No, but it’s just nice. It’s like how I RT info on FPQ and they RT info about our recent Tweetup.
But that’s such a jackass move on my part, right?
About that Tweetup: I find it especially interesting that you say that nobody at The Bee is interested in interacting with people on the real world, when in fact, the day after you wrote this post we were hosting a Tweetup, an event aimed at interacting with the people who we follow and who follow us on Twitter in real life.
To pin all this to the level of journalism at The Bee is a bit of an overreaction. It’s not like we’re the only news organization out there who — gasps — follows people in its community. Nor are we the only Web site out there that follows people.
From a personal standpoint (i.e. this is me speaking for me, not for The Bee), I think following local people helps me get a pulse on the community, to “listen” to what people are talking about. So yes, I am quite interested in substance. Does that mean everybody I follow posts a deep, insightful or humorous tweet everytime? No. But I’m listening in case they might. And some do.
It seems to me that this post is more about you disliking The Bee and selectively using things I said in what I intended to be a helpful blog post to back up your dislike for The Bee. That’s cool, if you hate The Bee. I can deal with that. Not the first time. Just don’t try to judge my outlook and the quality of my work based on your preconceptions.
Peter-
I’m sorry to say it, but this is equal parts non-sensical and bitter. The argument trying to correlate the content of the Fresno Bee with the Twitter opinions of ONE writer borders on absurd. There are so many people who are involved in a production like the Bee that it just seems you are trying to formulate that argument to strengthen the pointed attacks against Mike. Even in their disagreements on the original issue, I never saw your brother or Mike take things in that direction.
As for your disagreement with Mike’s stance on Twitter – I think you have a couple of decent points, but they get muddled up in all of the swipes that you are taking. I get that this is your blog and this is your space to do as you please, but at least the original conversation on Twitter and the dialogue on your brother’s blog right now have done something to advance the conversation and give the community something to digest and really contemplate. I’m sorry, but a tirade like this does nothing but foster ill-will and cause people to start choosing sides and throwing more jabs. I think that is unfortunate. Really unfortunate.
this superfluously nuanced and contrived argument you have posed here has convinced me. fuck mike osegueda.
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Mike Oz said:
No, you didn’t explain that. You stated that your comments specifically applied to “brands on Twitter,” not that they don’t apply to personal stuff. Sure, I guess that was supposed to be implied, but the distinction between “personal” and “brands” seems somewhat porous or even false on Twitter. Some people on Twitter use it it for self-promotion, others use it it as a form of commercial advertising, some use it just to spread information but not necessarily in a promotive or advertising sense, and so on. All of those are mixed in with individuals who are just throwing tweets out there for all kinds of reasons. I’ve flirted with several approaches on Twitter, from self-promotion to just saying what I’m thinking about whatever.
But as an individual on Twitter, I sense a spectrum of promotion. Some people reek of it, but some people don’t, and there is everything in between. The more promotion I smell from somebody on Twitter, the less I like them. (Strangely enough, that includes my own Twitter feed, which includes a few lame attempts at self-promotion—all of which made me feel dirty.) And I don’t really care whether you think promotion is legitimate or not, I think it’s disingenuous and jackassy. I’ve always thought sales, in all its many forms, was disingenuous and jackassy. In my profession, a certain amount of self-promotion and “networking” is required, and I feel disingenuous and jackassy when I have to do that, too.
It just irritates me to no end that people, all of us, including me, have this need, I guess, to hijack the natural propensity of others to form relationships so that we can execute our desire to squeeze money out of them. I know it’s the way things are, that it’s unavoidable, but it irritates the hell out of me. And it irritates me even more when people come along and rationalize it, normalize it, and make it into a business, as you’ve done.
That’s what underlies a lot (but not all) of my problem with what I called “personality and convention” in the post. It’s ignoring substance, or at least exercising no intelligence or discrimination primarily as to substance, and using others, or interaction with others, as a way to, ultimately, dupe them into some action that will make money for you—which, for you, could be as simple as exposing them to copy from your advertisers.
Again, I know that’s just one of the pitfalls of the world. As I said above, promotion is an “acceptable use of Twitter.” But I’m an intransigent idealist in that respect, and simply cannot beat out of myself my fundamental disgust with how people use each other, even when we do it nicely. And that applies to my profession, too. It prevents me, I think, from just deciding that I should exploit my clients for personal gain, or somehow feel okay with the fact that I gain when my clients suffer. That bothers me, and the same principles bother me even in so trite and ephemeral an arena as Twitter. (I know, that sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But it’s truthful.)
Mike Oz also said:
From the context, when I wrote, it sure looked like you were endorsing it. But having just reread it, I’ve decided the situation is even worse and that this paragraph makes no sense at all:
When you say “that’s a little different,” it’s not clear what “that” refers to: the act of not shaking the hand, or the metaphor itself? And then when you say “the sentiment still stands,” what are you talking about? Either way, by the end of the paragraph, it sure sounds like you are endorsing whatever came before. But now I’m not sure what did come before.
So you’re welcome to clarify what you meant.
Mike Oz also said:
If you say it that way, I wouldn’t call it a “jackass move.” But that’s not the remark I was responding to. You said said “[if] I know you’re not following our account and you only see Tweets if they mention you, then I might be less likely to RT your stuff, because I know you’re not going to return the favor.” That runs things in a different direction and puts some intentionality into your decision to retweet something, where you make the decision to retweet based on certain information, like whether the person is following you, which you correlate with the likelihood of their retweeting you. But your more recent remark makes it sound as though you don’t actually make that consideration, and it’s just a happy coincidence if somebody reciprocates on retweeting. Those are two completely different outlooks. If you have a way of bringing them into line with each other, you’re welcome to explain.
Mike Oz also said:
Except that’s not what I said, is it? I just reread my post, looking for where I said that, because I didn’t remember writing it. And I was not at all surprised to find that I didn’t actually say that. But I think I found the sentence you have misconstrued:
Is that what you’re talking about? The “engaged with the real world” phrase? If so, then you have come pretty close to stumbling right into the tendency I was criticizing. The sentence I just quoted was supposed to echo a theme throughout the post. Here it is, with each iteration pulled out of context:
The point of the post was not that you or anyone at the Bee fails to “interact with people in the real world.” You’re a newspaper for crying out loud—of course you interact with people in the real world. My point was different: The Bee rarely strikes me as a collection of people who are really interested in the people of this area, how they think and work, and why Fresno is the way it is. Instead, almost all of the time, the Bee just comes across as a bunch of content. And the websites, the newspaper, the Twitter feeds, the online commenting system (which Adam has lambasted for a long time, rightly in my view), all the different media, just feel like exploitation of potential viewers of ads. And that’s exactly the outlook I see in your comment on Adam’s blog, which I discussed in the post above.
Sure, you’re the hip guy that promotes the local music scene, and the gaming, and all that. And maybe you got that position because you came to it with a preexisting interest in those things. But now your paycheck is on the line, and I think that shows, in a bad way. It makes you an exemplar of the kind of relentless promotion-and-sales outlook that, as I tried to explain above, irritates and inflames the hell out of me. It’s not that I think you don’t “interact with the real world,” but that I think you don’t evince much care or thoughtfulness about the real world. Which is not to say that you don’t care or think about the world, or the people in it; I just mean that in what you do with and for the Bee, that doesn’t really come through, in my opinion.
You and others obviously disagree. Which is fine.
Childers said:
That’s why I twice called it “speculation.”
Childers also said:
That’s one of the reasons why I wrote my own blog post.
Childers also said:
Maybe, but Mike came and commented and tried to make his views clearer, and so did you and someone else. And I received another email from someone this morning. And I responded to Mike’s comment just now (and tried to make my views clearer, too). All of that discussion, except for the pointless comment by “floyd” above, has been civil and interesting. That doesn’t look like like “ill-will” and “choosing sides and throwing more jabs” to me.
One more thing that Childers said, which I forgot to respond to in my last comment:
You didn’t really explain which part is non-sensical, except to criticize my admitted speculation for what it is. That doesn’t make it “non-sensical”; that just makes it weak, which I knew and admitted when I wrote it. You suggest that “There are so many people who are involved in a production like the Bee that it just seems you are trying to formulate that argument to strengthen the pointed attacks against Mike,” but that isn’t the way I wrote the post, and, having reread it, doesn’t seem to be the way the post comes across to me. It wasn’t, “If you don’t like the Bee, here’s why you shouldn’t like Mike,” but more like, “If you don’t like the Bee, maybe here’s another reason.” If it came across the first way, then that’s just my poor writing, which I am on a perpetual quest to improve. But it’s not “non-sensical.”
The “bitter” part perplexes me. I happen to think The Fresno Bee is a much lesser paper than it could be, than an area the size of Fresno should be able to support. My shorthand way of saying that is “the Bee is a lousy paper.” It also happens that what Mike writes for the paper very infrequently interests me. But it’s not like he has wronged me, or that I feel personally attacked by what I perceive as the lousiness of the paper, so I have to tell you that “bitter” does not describe how I feel. A more accurate adjective for how I feel about the Bee in general would be “disappointed.” And if you want to put a one-word label on my emotional response to Mike, I can’t think of one. It’s more like, “meh,” which isn’t really anything.
I have definitely written some blog posts that could fairly be called “non-sensical.” And I will be the first to tell you that the vast majority of the people in the world will not be interested in reading my blog regularly. I fluctuate so wildly between abstruse philosophical topics, extremely obscure jokes, pointed criticism of local officials, and denunciations of religion, that just about everybody is going to be offended by something I say, sooner or later.
I am also no stranger to people showing up here, telling me how wrong I am, and implying (or just saying straight out) that I am living in a fog of misconception and am not even aware of the faults in my own posts. That just makes me laugh. All writing is artifice and if you want to write, eventually you have to stop writing and let somebody else read it. And everybody who writes a reasonable amount has had the experience of coming back to an old passage and wondering, “What the hell was I thinking when I wrote that?” Sometimes I sit down to write a post, I write and write, I know it’s faulty, but given time constraints, I think it’s close enough. And that heralds in the great thing about blogs: the comments! That’s where all the weaknesses get shoved into the spotlight and you have to say, “Okay, is that really what I meant? Can I clarify that?” As the author of the post, you learn.
But you also need to understand my personality and how I handle the blog. Adversarial conversations don’t bother me. Many times, people can reach insights that neither party to a conversation would have reached alone, if they persist in their disagreement a little longer, if they dig in their heels, if they really fight to flatten out the twisted ideas that the other is calling nonsense.
Part of the reason why your “non-sensical and bitter” remark perplexes me is that you don’t really explain it. I have no idea what makes something “non-sensical” to your mind, or what type of writing causes you to perceive “bitter” emotions. And I am not sure exactly what I wrote that prompted you to respond that way. Most of your comment after that remark had nothing to do with those two concepts (nonsense and bitterness), that I can tell.
But, in keeping with my view of what can make blogs so fun, you are quite welcome to elaborate. Just keep in mind that, while you may be onto something, I’m likely to put up a fight.
Anyway, thanks for commenting.
Also (sorry, I forgot to include this in my lengthy comment above), Mike: Thanks for commenting.
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