Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

CRESTWOOD TAVERN — Someone asked me last night after about the third Southern Pecan Brown Ale if I had made any New Year’s resolutions for 2010, and if so, did I plan to write about them? Since I hadn’t given it even a whiff of a thought, I said no, “but maybe I’ll get around to it.”

I don’t get paid $1.2 million a year to write two newspaper columns a week like Maureen Dowd, so there’s nothing in my contract that forces me to write such a column promising New Year’s resolutions but instead reporting on hanging out with and defending the woman in charge of Homeland Security.

But when I woke up this morning and saw the thermometer stuck on 20 degrees, I cranked up the new Mr. Coffee and started surfing the Web to see if there were any good columns in news Webland reporting good ideas for the new year and the new decade. Somehow it came as no shock to find that the best ideas came not from a highly-paid career newspaper columnist, but from a rock star: Bono: Ten Ideas for the Next Ten Years.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been trying to tell people for the past 10 years that the era of the mass circulation daily newspaper is over. But you would be surprised at the places you can still go and get an argument about such things.

Here in Birmingham, Alabama, we have exactly one world-class bar. It is called The Garage Café. It was written up by GQ magazine a few years back, although probably in part since the manager is not a Web geek, you can’t even find the link to the story in Google anymore, because the link was never promoted.

I stopped by the place a couple of weeks ago and sat next to the bar manager and a former player for the University of Alabama’s football team back in the 1980s. When I whipped out my iPhone and called up the Saban wink photo and showed it to them, they were impressed at first — until I told them the only place you could see it was on the Web. If it had appeared in the New York Times or the Birmingham News, they would have told every friend they know and hung the damn thing on the wall of the bar. But since it was only on the Web, they just shrugged their shoulders and started talking about how they hoped print would survive.

It was about that very moment that the local kid who writes for the Birmingham Weekly, who also just happened to inherit my position as the local stringer for the New York Times after I got in the fight with the business editor during the Scrushy trial in 2005, got up and stormed out of the bar. You see he is still a print nerd, and actually thinks people should have to pay for the contents of a newspaper, even though he writes for a newspaper that is distributed for free.

You see there is no accounting for taste, or intelligence. So he and the regulars at The Garage bar have become this town’s equivalent of the old mens’ barbershop, where old timers sit around and talk about the good old days, when newsprint meant something.

So in recent days, since I have no desire to hang out with old geezers or young idiots, I have changed watering holes to a place closer to home with better food anyway. The Crestwood Tavern, located just a couple of miles up Crestwood Boulevard from the old Eastwood Mall (now a giant Wal-mart), has the best damn quesadillas I’ve ever eaten, and that is saying something. When I lived in New Orleans, I lived for the quesadillas at Le Bon Temps Roule on Magazine Street. These are better, but what has that got to do with New Year’s resolutions?

Hang on and let me get another cup of joe and we’ll get to that…

One of my Facebook friends wrote the other day that she was hoping to suffer fools more kindly in the new year. Since you can only write about a sentence in the little space allowed for a Facebook post, it is not clear what she meant. But in the comments, I wrote just the opposite, which is New Year’s resolution number one.

I will not only NOT suffer fools gladly in the new year or the new decade, I plan to stop suffering for fools anymore at all.

By fools I mean the print nerds at bars, as well as conspiracy theorists, anonymous bloggers and anonymous blog commenters, and even former newspaper reporters who think they can sell books on the Web that nobody will buy or read. Fools also refers to the anonymous sources for those anonymous blogs and vanity press books, as well as talk radio hosts who promote bad ideas. I think I could live the rest of my life without ever having to deal with idiots like that ever again.

As I indicated to my new friend Violet at The Tavern, great journalism is still being produced in this country, but you won’t find it in print. The best journalism in the world these days is being produced for the Web Press. So you may be able to guess my other New Year’s resolution. It’s the same one I’ve had for the past four years, really.

We will rebuild the watchdog press in this country, which is an absolute necessity for democracy to work. But it will not be printed on paper with ink or delivered to your house in a truck or on a bicycle. It will be published on the Web and come to you on your computer via the Internet.

Too bad them geezers down at The Garage will miss it. They have no idea what they are missing.

Of course they are still talking about convicted Mayor Larry Langford as if his travails had anything to do with the problems facing Birmingham. Local political corruption on such a small scale is not Birmingham’s problem. Maybe the problem is, too many people are still getting their news from old technology, like printed newspapers and talk radio.

It will take awhile longer. But eventually, even in a backward place like Birmingham, Alabamaland, the Web will catch fire. Maybe when American Idol starts letting people vote on the Web as well as on the telephone, they will start to get the picture.

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Tags: Do Not Suffer Fools, New Year's Resolutions

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 7:57 am and is filed under Under the Microscope III. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.