PoHo On My Deggans Post

Wayne Garcia takes issue with "one point" in my post on St. Petersburg Times Eric Deggans.

Deggans is not an ombudsman in any sense of the word; he is a media reporter, mostly writing about other media forms and companies. Both dailies in town generally leave the other alone and out of their news columns.

Garcia is correct. As I said in the Political Whore comments: the ombudsman remark was snark. My point was Deggans has a hard time finding fault in the publication he works for. Deggans is a good media critic, with the exception when it comes to his own newspaper. Deggans responsibilities at The St. Petersburg Times is not the same as the Washington Post's Deborah Howell.

Garcia's post brings up an unsaid truth. The Tampa Tribune and St. Petersburg Times have an unspoken agreement to not critique each other's journalism standards. The losers are readers that aren't aware if they are misinformed. Bloggers are happy to point out inaccuracies in news articles. With the exception of huge blogs such as Huffington Post and Daily Kos, weblogs do not reach the same audience as newspapers. Readers will never know if they read sloppy journalism. The hands-off attitude between the Tampa Tribune and St. Petersburg Times hurts citizens attempting to make informed choices.

Update: Eric Deggans takes exception with my previous post.

The fact is, I have found fault with many things my employer has done, most notably, the April TBT headline "He Died of Shame," which accompanied a story on WFLA weatherman John winter's suicide.

I wrote a direct criticism of that headline on my blog which was picked up by many national media blogs, including Poynter's Romenesko site and Mediabistro.com. I did it with little or no discussion with superiors and no idea what the professional consequences would be.

I also criticized TBT's pattern of running in-your face headlines to go with stories written for our main paper which are more fairly balanced.

When the New York Times ran a blindingly complimentary article about our business model, I wrote a blog post which pointed out that it was a mistaken hypothesis, given all the reductions we're going through these days.

I haven't read the articles Deggans mentioned. I have no oppinion pro or con. Deggans has the right to defend himself. Go read his comment.