Perhaps I spoke too soon about the whole "John Edwards story going mainstream" business. After a couple of reports by my colleagues elsewhere in the vast McClatchy chain appeared last week, there was bupkis out of the MSM. I mean, I got more traction trying to climb Airport Road in my 1961 Ranchero during an ice storm.
I think all the serious political reporters are just waiting for the National Enquirer to break more news. Then they'll pounce. It's a weird way to do journalism, for sure, but not that surprising. There's very little upside for news editors to be early on this story (no one is talking up Edwards as a VP right now), while the downside is considerable. The blogosphere, however, has gone wild over this story, and simply by deigning to talk about it, TV Barn — a blog, mind you, kept by a MSM entertainment critic — just had its biggest weekend in a decade of service.
Reaction to my piece has ranged from the adversarial to the hotly adversarial to off-the-charts, like this blogger whose line-by-line analysis of my story would make any JFK/9-11/TWA 800 conspiracy theorist proud.
But hey, if that's the price I must pay for this kind of traffic ... where do I sign up for auto-debit?
Another story I wish the MSM would embrace is my small but not insignificant crusade to get a really embarrassing typo on Buck O'Neil's gravesite fixed. Last month I visited the new memorial set up for the Negro Leagues great and observed that on the side of the stone with his career achievements, his last name had been spelled like Shaquille's.
(By the way, you'll notice this memorial was put in a rather odd spot, right next to the Forest Hill Cemetery office parking lot, with dinky ornamental hedges in between. O'Neil and his wife are actually buried about 100 yards away in a part of the adjacent Catholic cemetery that has no room for a spread of this sort. Meanwhile, deep inside Forest Hill is this memorial to Satchel Paige, who actually is buried at his own memorial. I don't doubt that there are good intentions all around. I just think that between the placement and the typo and the not-buried-here part, it falls way short of what Buck deserves.)
After my first posting went up, Yahoo Sports was good enough to do a story, as did Bottom Line. But I didn't hear from the Negro Leagues museum or SI Memorials, which co-sponsored the site. Gee, too bad I don't know anybody who works at the Kansas City Star sports department ...
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