Seattle Post-Times

You have a constitutional right to practice irresponsible journalism

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Ever since he came on the scene, I've been a big fan of Seattle Times baseball writer Geoff Baker. He's a great beat reporter, and just as important in this day and age, he gets the new media landscape. He writes an excellent blog. He engages his readers and is down with the local baseball blogosphere. He's tireless and was born to do what he does.

Today Baker posted his thoughts about a recent controversy involving former Seattle Mariner Raul Ibanez and Jerod Morris, a blogger elsewhere who, offering statistical analysis but no other evidence, has implied that perhaps Ibanez's improved recent performance is due to something other than his own hard work. In his own blog post, Baker rips Morris a new one, without naming him, and suggests that it's time for non-professional journalists to get some training and learn to look their subjects in the eye when writing critically of them. This is where Baker loses me. There's a certain lack of nuance to this analysis, much as I respect his baseball coverage.

A Seattle media time capsule

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer today waxes nostalgic about the 30th anniversary of the Seattle SuperSonics winning the NBA championship — the only big-league title ever won by a Seattle team. (No, I don't count the Stanley Cup of 1917.)

Not being a basketball fan, and then being a relatively recent transplant, I wasn't all that into the Sonics. But I do recall that weekend in Seattle vividly because I had just moved here for the summer — to take some classes at the University of Washington, to get a taste of a big university and Seattle before finishing up the following fall at Whitman College in Walla Walla.

I lived that summer of 1979 in the basement of a house on Brooklyn Avenue Northeast, which a friend shared with other UW students. Except for a seminal course on media law taught by Don Pember, it was an unremarkable quarter academically, which was in no small way due to the fact that I was myself academically unremarkable. Had a blast living in Seattle, though, and I vowed to return. Which I did, for good, six years later, to work for The Seattle Times, a paper I first got acquainted with that summer long ago.

But I digress. The real reason I'm blogging this is to point out a very interesting component of the P-I's story today about the old Sonics. It links to a PDF of the June 3, 1979, edition of the P-I, and on that front page are examples of how things crazily change and stay the same over time: