Over the weekend, we called out Washington Post blogger Joel Achenbach for disrespecting Houston.
Today, the Chronicle‘s blogger Kyrie O’Connor storms into the middle of the fray:
Look, it’s not my job to defend Houston. More to the point, I am defending open eyes. Your first editor at your first job should have explained to you how important it is to go into a situation with your senses poised and your mind alert. You can go in with a hypothesis, as my friend David Fink used to say, as long as you’re willing to have your hypothesis overturned. I’m on the side of reporting, not on the side of Houston. You took the “easy figure” with your talk of Houston as an undifferentiated cell. It’s just lazy, and if you worked for me, you’d be covering the sewer board meetings in the Virginia ‘burbs for a while until you recalled why you got into this line of work in the first place — to be the eyes and ears of the reader, not the spouter of preconceived notions.
Ouch! Bigtime brawl in MSM blogland! Round, O’Connor. Easily.
O’Connor also links over and calls the blogHOUSTON crew her friends, which may have prompted a little head scratching.
Here’s the scoop on that. I’ve come to the conclusion — with the help of some readers but also after discussion among ourselves — that maybe some of us haven’t treated O’Connor with as much respect as good Texans should. I brought a little of that attitude over from my personal blog, but this is intended to be a somewhat more serious place. And serious Texans ought to be respectful Texans.
So, we’re hoping to make some sort of peace with O’Connor. That’s not to say we won’t ever criticize her posts again, but we can probably do it in a more respectful manner than we have at times, and with the understanding that links (are you listening/reading, Dan Patrick?) and criticism and praise are currency, and that as we trade them, the collective activity might actually bring some light to various matters in Houston and elsewhere. It doesn’t need to be nasty.
That’s the promise of this open-source medium, right? That’s what we often say here, so that’s probably how we should behave.
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