Raise the Hammer

Might I offer a few hollow words to this discussion.

I communicated with Sheryl on this, originally I suggested that OpenFile do a story on it, and Sheryl wasn't immediately sure if it was something OpenFile wanted to cover. The same day, we began drafting the statement. The way we did it, we were basically inviting anyone who felt the same way to sign it with us- which includes other media outlets. We were pretty clear on that.

Sheryl wrote an opinion piece after consulting with her editors, and they decided not to sign the statement, which was absolutely their call to make. I think we felt that Peggy's comments were specifically directed towards bloggers/citizen journalists, etc., and wanted to respond to that. Not necessarily drawing a line in the sand, but rather responding to someone drawing that line for us. Sheryl and I had a very good discussion about it on the phone, both of us made fair points, and we agreed to disagree on a few things.

Anyway- this all happened more than 6 months ago, and I don't think it really has any bearing on the topic of OpenFile closing down.

What I will say is that I had the pleasure of working with OpenFile to do some local content, and Sheryl was a good editor in my experience- she kept my writing focused, but didn't over-edit any of my pieces either. It was a good arrangement.

As everyone probably knows, media is an increasingly tricky business, and everyone is under a crunch right now. Things don't always work out, and there's more to it than just who is at the helm- a big part of it is also the crapshoot of catching people's attention away from Bieber and America's Got Talent. They ought to be commended for giving the model a shot here. For the time that they were around, they paid a bunch of people well to do local content. I'm not going to nitpick on that.

And everybody should run for office sometime.