Howell Raines, when he was at the New York Times (pre-Jayson Blair) talked about how he was rebuilding the Times’ newsroom to ‘flood the zone’. It’s a term derived from sports and football, whereby an offense can overwhelm a zone defense by sending more offensive players to a designated spot than defensive players able to cover them.
Raines’ flooded the zone on 9-11, and in other stories, by dumping reporters and resources into a single project.
In Pittsburgh (thanks to Romenesko), we know they are flooding the zone over the news that Pittsburgh Steelers star quarterback Ben Roethlisberger entered surgery following a motorcycle accident (in which he was not wearing a helmet).
ESPN today was basically all-Roethlisberger-all-the-time. Now, as a sports fan, I see the importance of the Super Bowl QB facing career-threatening injuries — and ESPN can cover sports however it wants.
But for Pittsburgh residents, it seems as if the two hometown papers could be using their resources a little better than assigning 14 reporters to a single motorcycle crash.
There are Pittsburgh political and news stories — of significance — that deserve those resources.
And, notice the LA Times show-stopping coverage of Nevada’s legal system. Why can’t these two well-heeled Pittsburgh newspapers cover the national political scandal continuing to develop less than 100 miles away, in Ohio.
3 Responses for "Flood the zone"
Well, not much else goes on in Pittsburgh this time of year and Ben Roethlisberger is already a legend in western Pennsylvania. He is probably one of the top three most recognized people in the whole state.
I’ll try not to sound like I’ve removed my tinfoil hat…
….the bigger (no, the BIGGEST) revelation that’s being kept of the (press) table is how the 2000/2004 elections were rigged. RIGGED.
These goons in Ohio were kind of a lynchpin in a national plan to keep the GOP as the majority party in both houses and the Executive Branch. Ney, however, got greedy, and worse, got caught.
The fallout wouldn’t be so dire if Ney and some of his staff weren’t *directly* involved in voter fraud. The (rightful) fear of other GOP ops is that Ney or his staff will bargain with prosecutors…give up a “big fish” to escape jail-time and a felony conviction. The “Big Fish” they have is Ney himself, and a small cadre of friends entrenched with Deibold, PNAC and The Rendon Group.
The neocons are spending a LOT of resources (mostly in the attention of tri-nomed women: Katherine Johnson Fent, Alexa Maldive-Sethstein, etc) to keep editors/reporters busy with other stuff.
For instance, a common “astroturf” method is to tie up a paper’s editors with pitch meetings, etc…ANYTHING to get them out of Ohio. They’re taking advantage of the deregulated media markets, too. One of the fallouts of consolidation was that many smaller papers have had production budgets sliced so the parent-companies could make shareholder expectations. Hence, editors are falling for “easy” stories…one’s whos narratives are pre-laid and “mad-lib” style: Fallen Sports hero narratives write themselves.
Political reporting has become dangerous work - physically, emotionally, and of course, economically dangerous, too. The DOJ has put reporters on notice that it will invoke near-century old sedition laws to punish reporters who print unfavorable stories. Talkradio shit-jocks and pug-faced trollops (Malkin) are giddily “outing” reporters they don’t like.
Anyhoo, this is just a commment here. I should GMOFB. :)
Very gooood project.
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