Christine Brennan knows more about being a national columnist than I do

This is follow-up to an earlier entry. Expect another piece on some of the issues raised in the previous post a little bit later after I've done all the legwork. You can read the first part here.

When I write things on my blog about people I don't know personally, I do so secure in the knowledge that they will never read what I've posted. I assume they are too stupid to use advanced Web 2.0 tools like Google. I'm veiled in an impenetrable cloak of Internet anonymity that allows me to disclose how much I hate other members of college basketball message boards without risking physical harm.

I rest assured that I'm completely untraceable... except when I'm not. Who would have guessed that putting my name in the title of my blog would prove my undoing?

On April 1, I wrote about USA Today columnist Christine Brennan. I titled it, "Do you understand what your job entails?"

"Ha!" I thought. "Take that, newspaper lady who graciously agreed to speak to my sports journalism class senior year! You thought you were talking to a group of timid college students. Little did you know you had a blogging superstar in your midst!"

Then I turned off my computer, sighed contentedly and waited for my readers (a strong, three-person support group, nearly half of which publicly admits to visiting my site) to pour over my latest offering. Brennan would never know how badly I had damaged her e-reputation, but my flock of rabid fans would.

And that's where the story ended. Or at least, that's where it would have ended if not for the fact that Christine Brennan owns at least one computer that is capable of using the Internet.

The next day I received an email from my professor. Brennan had found my blog and she wanted to talk to me.

Oops.

I had written primarily to criticize her for saying that she didn't often look at the reader comments under the online versions of her USA Today columns. Having been a part of an online newspaper in high school, I have strong feelings on the subject. The Internet has changed the way news media operates and I don't always feel that people who joined the industry when "dot com" sounded like editing shorthand for forgotten punctuation get that.

I read back over what I'd written after I received the email and wondered if perhaps I'd been a bit... overzealous. In hindsight, calling her "smug" and "cocky" might not have helped strengthen my argument.

Her offer to sit down and meet with me also failed to lend credence to the aloof portrait I painted of her.

We met at Politics & Prose last week to discuss what she took issue with in my blog. She'd already told me on the phone right after I'd written it, but I'd been a bit too shocked at the time to think to take notes. This time I was armed with pen and paper.

"We're not talking about the cure for cancer here," she told me after we shook hands. That put me at ease. It was good to know that my blog entry fell somewhere below matters of life and death on her list of important things to talk about.

We then got down to the matter at hand. I'm going to break into a pseudo-Q-and-A format here, which my old high school newspaper adviser would tell me is a very lazy way to do things, but hey, this is a blog and I'm not getting paid.

Where, in her opinion, had I gone wrong?

Well, to start off, she felt I may have gone a bit overboard when I wrote the following: "Did you know she gave Tony Kornheiser the ideas for many of his columns back when he actually still wrote for The Washington Post...?"

Fair enough. I was trying to be funny, but I guess I took what she said out of context. She clarified for me: "When I covered the Redskins, Tony and I talked about column ideas." That sounds similar to what I wrote, but there is a distinction. My statement makes it sound like she told him what to think. Her explanation defines her role as more of a sounding board. She was the Post's Redskins beat reporter and what I believe she means is that they would sometimes discuss what was going on with the team.

As for the main thrust of my post, Brennan agreed with my central point, she just didn't think she "was the person to make that with." As she noted, she had told our class she does her best to respond to every email that comes her way.

But what's the difference between comments and email and why does one deserve a response while the other sometimes gets ignored?

Here she reminded me of the way anonymous Internet tough guys work. She referred to the "food fight" going on in the comment section on several occasions. Under many articles, she said, the commenters end up attacking one another, leaving a messy argument she doesn't always have time to wade into.

"Even if I wanted to email Dirtydog37, how would I do that?" she asked.

I checked out the USA Today comment section briefly and even registered, but I'm not entirely sure if there's a way to publicly display your email address in your user profile. There's an option to send a message, but I don't know whether or not USA Today discourages its writers from using that feature. Dirtydog37, if you're reading this, email me. I've got her number.

I looked through some of the comments on her articles and the tenor of the discussion and the number of replies varied widely based, as one would expect, on what the topic was. Certainly there are instances of personal attacks ("She is a media Tiger butt kisser. She's also an Obama butt kisser as well. It's true about meida [sic], and especially media "chicks", they're Obama-girls and Tiger-girls"), but some of the articles produced fairly focussed replies that stuck to the issues she brought up in her column.

That isn't to say I don't see where she's coming from. In addition to her obligations at USA Today, her website describes her as a "commentator for ABC News, ESPN, NPR and Fox Sports Radio." That doesn't leave much time for anything else. "At some point you have to go, 'Where are the hours in the day?'" she explained.

I should explain that I wasn't advocating that she spend the day constantly clicking the refresh button on her column nor was I saying that I thought she should respond to every reader. I simply felt it was important to get a sense of what people thought of her writing and possibly to acknowledge the readers from time to time.

Clearly she does that. She even took the time to sit down with a recent college grad who essentially depicted her as an egomaniac based on one very limited interaction.

I suppose I can maybe cut her a little slack.

So did anything positive come out of what I'd written initially?

"Since our conversation [on the phone], I do look at the comments more."

Ha! Take that!

Do you understand what your job entails?

Christine Brennan of USA Today made an appearance at my sports journalism class the other day.

Did you know she gave Tony Kornheiser the ideas for many of his columns back when he actually still wrote for The Washington Post and she's great friends with all the important TV people? Did you know that MLB Commissioner Bud Selig once called her up out of the blue and she gave him a piece of her mind because she's one tough hombre, but he still really liked her book even though she was tough on him? Did you know that she is the reason every exciting or interesting sports story you've ever read got published?

So she's got a bit of an ego. Oh well. So smugness has taken up permanent residence on her face in the form of a cocky half smile and every single one of her sentences involves a namedrop of some sort. C'est la vie. It's her life to live.

If she's doing her job well, I suppose complete self-satisfaction is tolerable.

But she isn't doing her job. And she admitted it to our class.

Today's columnists and news bloggers have a responsibility to interact with their audience. It's part of Internet journalism. That doesn't mean you have to respond to each idiotic response, but you owe it to your readers to take their thoughts into consideration. It's a dialogue of sorts and what better way to get a sense of what the general public is thinking than by reading reactions to your opinion? That should really give you more material to work with and a better understanding of what would make your articles more relevant.

I was shocked when Christine Brennan told us that she doesn't read the comments posted on her column. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium she works in.

I'm not completely talking out of my ass here. I've never been a prominent columnist in a national newspaper, but I know how this commenting business works. I spent two years sifting through comments sent into our high school online paper. Some of those comments were on articles I'd written, so I'd argue that I've been in a similar position to her own before.

Yes, there are a lot of stupid people out there on the Internet, but when you're posting somewhere millions of people have the potential to read what you've written, you have to expect some of those stupid people to say obnoxious things about your piece. Oh well. Deal with it. It comes with the job.

And who knows? Someone out there might actually have something intelligent to say or might have some information you can use to help further your investigation into the subject.

Brennan wasn't the first person I'd heard recently express an unwillingness to engage with the readership. I asked one of The Washington Post bloggers (hint: not Dan Steinberg) what he thought of the comments he received. He had much the same response, albeit he was far less obnoxious about it and didn't seem as contemptuous.

Still, it makes me wonder what percentage of journalists out there get it. Part of journalism must surely be having a thick skin and part of new media journalism must surely be finding a way to have a manageable conversation with readers.

My high school newspaper adviser John Mathwin understood this and he was by no means a man of cyberspace. To him, acknowledging the people sitting at the other end of the Internet tubes was just common sense. But if my incredibly tiny sample size is any indication, apparently it's something that needs to be taught.

A lot of media organizations seem like they're so close to getting it right. There are a lot of interactive features out there. They just need to hire the right people to carry them out.