The Yang Slinger: Vol. XIV

What happens to journalists when they leave the business and become former journalists? Also, the time a New York Rangers executive told me blacks can't play hockey and 5 questions with Neal Boudette.

I am 49, turning 50 in April.

As a journalist, I feel as if I’m as sharp as I’ve ever been. I know all the tricks I lacked as a youth. I have more contacts than ever before. If I need to reach a ballplayer, I’ll reach one. If I’m writing the saga of someone I’ve never met, I possess the tools to dig and scratch and claw my way into a story. I’m a better writer than I was at, oh, 25. A better reporter and interviewer, too.

I am, I like to think, at the top of my game.

And I’m not alone as a veteran who feels this way. Talk to writers with experience and you’ll talk to writers who (mostly) appear to be comfortable in their own skins. They know how to work a locker room, work a police station, work a campaign trail. They understand the underbelly of the business and weak spots in the universes they cover. Just like being a top-shelf physician takes years, being a top-shelf journalist¹ takes years, too. You’re no longer cocky—merely confident. Through life’s highs and lows, you’ve ceased living with absolutely every word of every sentence of every paragraph. You learn what’s important. Editors trust your judgment. Readers know your name.

And then, just when we arrive at this beautiful apex, many of us …

Leave.

Sometimes it’s by choice. Oftentimes it’s not. A cheaper option comes along. A kid out of college. Maybe two years out of college. He’s young and hungry. She’s amazing on social media. He knows half the Syracuse women’s vollyball roster. She knows half the UCLA football roster. You’re in your 23rd year at the newspaper, making $87,000 plus benefits. The newbie will work for less than half of that. The newbie also has zero expectations. Time off? Expense report? Company basketball team? Holiday party? None of that exists to Junior, because Junior has been raised in the modern no-frills landscape and simply wants a shot.

So here you sit. Older. A tad less enthusiastic. A tiny bit behind the times (you still call it “The Facebook”). Dwindling circulations kill you. Click bait eats away at your stomach. The next time an editor says, “You need to Tweet more”—he dies. You don’t know what to do or where to go. No other newspaper will pay you your salary. There’s a job opening for the San Jose State beat writer that starts at $39k. There’s a copy editing position in Toledo. Oh wait, too late. It was filled yesteday. By a 23-year old with a pierced tongue. You have two kids in college and a third about to join them. You’ve got seven more years left on your mortgage. All you know how to do is be a reporter.

You are lost.

Totally lost.

And then, one day, you’re not lost.

You’re gone.

There is a picture that hangs in my garage. It dates back to 1999, and the National League Championship Series between the Mets and Braves at Shea Stadium. A bunch of reporters are surrounding Atlanta pitcher John Rocker. I am one of them—the doofus in the Kangol eating his pen …

The image was snapped by a Sports Illustrated photographer. There’s a near-identical one—somehow lost in my house beneath old clippings and press credentials and the like—that offers a wider perspective. Instead of the five reporters in the image, it’s about, oh, 30 of us. All listening in as Rocker talks his talk.

Through the decades, I’ve used that photograph as a barometer. Five years after it was shot, I knew the whereabouts of most of the journalists. Some bounced a bit, but they were all (I believe) in the business. Ten years after it was shot, the landscape began to shift. Yeah, the majority of scribes remained employed. Buuuuuut … slippage was starting.

And starting some more.

And some more.

And some more.

As we sit here now, 23 years removed from John Rocker, a solid 95 percent of the reporters standing to my left and right, forward and back, are ghosts, forever scattered to the winds that blow former journalists toward the steno pad-shaped clouds of a distant land. T.R. Sullivan. Kit Stier. Sam Weinman. Steve Hummer. Karen Rosen. Ursula Reel. Thomas Hill. Rafael Hermoso. Mark Herrmann. Bob Herzog. Ross Newhan. Carroll Rogers. On and on and on. Here yesterday, gone today.

And something about that makes me happy/sad. Happy, because I’ve managed to survive. I went from Sports Illustrated to Newsday to some short-lived columnist gigs and a sustained career as an author. Sad, though, because—deep down—I tend to assume those who cease being journalists don’t actually want to cease being journalists. I mean, from this vantage point it’s the world’s greatest gig: You get to engage with folks you’d never ordinarily engage; you get to see things you’d never otherwise see; your work is actually read and discussed by real people(!); and—as the great Jack McCallum long ago told me—you’ll always have the best stories to share at your high school reunion. This, I’ve learned, is undeniably true. Also, not for nothing, the Dodger Stadium press box has an ice cream machine.

But then … my assumption was sorta tossed aside. I started reaching out to former journalists. Dozens upon dozens of former journalists. I put out a social media APB, anxious to understand why people left the business, and whether they regret the move. There’s a lot to unpack.

First, the basics:

• Going into this, I figured the biggest emotional blow of transitioning from journalist to former journalist would be the ego hit. And that sting is certainly real. “There was a huge sense of pride, to see your byline atop a story,” said Kurtis Hair, who made $12.50 per hour as a crime/government/features reporter for the News Press in Stillwater, Okla. “When you have the feeling that you’re serving a community, there’s a hint of ego, if not a major whiff.”

Most, however, described the roughest part not as a pride hit, but as surrendering-the-dream hit. At one point or another, all aspiring writers have an ah-ha moment where they think/realize/know, “This is what I want to do!” For some, it’s covering that first ballgame. For others, it’s sitting across from a figure you genuinely admire. For me, it was an article I wrote for my high school newspaper, The Chieftain, back in 1989. I was sports editor, and I penned a column headlined, CHEERLEADING: SPORT OR ACTIVITY? I concluded that it was mere activity, and the day the piece dropped I found myself surrounded by a dozen angry cheerleaders. They were enraged, but all my never-kissed-a-girl self saw (cue: “Wonder Years” theme) was a slo-mo buffet of hair and skirts and legs and breasts.

I was all in from that day forward.

And the dream—it pulls you. It drives you. It moves you. Aspiring to be a journalist isn’t the same as aspiring to be a CPA or aspiring to be a math teacher. I’m not saying the gig is any more important than those fields, because it’s not. But journalism, as a career, feels (to those who do it) closer to becoming a singer or actor. Most of us grew up wanting to be Dan Jenkins or Jerry Thompson or Bob Woodward or Barbara Walters. And while that’s certainly self-indulgent, it’s also true. So letting go—well, it’s rough. “The job itself was a dream,” said Joe Zavala, a former reporter for the Mail Tribune in Medford, Ore. who now works in communications. “Do I miss journalism? Of course. Talking to interesting people all day, researching, newsroom banter, election night ... on and on. Who doesn't get romantic about that stuff after they leave it?”

• There are two major reasons most of the people I spoke with left the profession.

No. 1: Money—Unless you’re working for a big place (ESPN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, a few others), journalism salaries these days are pretty fucking brutal. Back in 1994, when I started out of college at The (Nashville) Tennessean, I was paid $26,000. Twenty eight years later, that’d still be reasonable beginner dough at many American papers. I know plenty of writers taking home $12 an hour, $13 an hour, working side gigs as bartenders or store clerks. With rare exception, it’s not a field that makes a person rich.

Kevin Damask, a 15-year newspaper veteran who bolted journalism last June to take a position with a business-to-business website, was expecting his first child with his wife, and the money, eh, it sorta sucked. “Consider this,” Damask said. “I've been with my current company for six months and I've already received a raise and we all got $600 bonuses before Christmas. I spent six years at Capital Newspapers and got one raise in that time. Money isn't everything, but for all the stuff newspapers ask journalists to do these days, most of the salaries are appalling.”

No. 2: Forced Out—This is the one that guts me, because you hear it all the time. Talented colleagues suddenly unemployed because ESPN is cutting back jobs or The Athletic is cutting back jobs. You’ll inevitably see a Tweet announcing the departure, alongside the supposed-to-appear-optimistic, “I’m excited for the next chapter.” Only, there is no next chapter. At least in journalism.

Back in 2008, Dave McKibben, the Los Angeles Times’ news and sports reporter for nearly two decades, was given a choice: Take the buyout or take the buyout. “The economy was a disaster in 2008 so the transition was brutally difficult,” he recalled. “I had a teaching certificate that I figured would come in handy. But school districts were laying off full-time teachers and in no hurry to hire someone who hadn’t taught in over 20 years and was coming from journalism. I wound up as a substitute teacher for a few years while also working part-time as a adjunct English teacher at a for- profit college. I missed the security of a full-time job, the salary, the people and the excitement of the newsroom, but not the deadlines and the newsroom politics. I’ve landed safely in PR after a rocky start, consulting for an agency in Orange County and owning my own agency for the last decade.”

The one that got me came about, oh, five or six years ago, when Steve Delsohn, ESPN’s breathtaking investigative journalist and the author of 12 books, lost his job. Steve wasn’t merely an A-plus talent. He was one of the most respected people in sports media. When the Grim Reaper arrived Steve was 59. He’d been in the field for three and a half decades. “It was very scary,” he said. “You don't know what you're going to do with the rest of your life, how you'll pay your own bills and help support your loved ones.” ESPN agreed to take care of the remaining 16 months of Steve’s contract, which was a temporary relief. “I looked for another TV reporting job, or perhaps running some kind of investigative TV unit,” he said. “There were some possibilities, but they weren't as good as working for Outside the Lines, and my wife and I would need to leave California. So I didn't formally apply for any of those positions.”

Ultimately, Steve started his own strategic communications firm. “It was purely an act of self-preservation,” he said. “And ultimately, it was a reinvention.”

Wait.

There’s a third reason people leave journalism, and it many ways it’s my favorite.

Come to think of it, it’s actually the reason I bolted Sports Illustrated back in the early months of 2003, when I was 31.

The whole thing (in hindsight) is strange. My lifelong dream had been to be an SI staffer. Then I became an SI staffer. And loved it. Loved it, loved it, loved it. But inevitably, the scene grew stale. One ballgame after another ballgame. Cliched interviews with ARod and Mike Sweeney and Al Leiter. Life on the road. More life on the road.

The moment when I knew it was time to think about bolting came during the 2001 World Series. It was Halloween night—Game 4 between the Diamondbacks and Yankees in New York. As the action commenced, I started to experience severe abdominal cramps. Like, raw pain. So I left, took the subway to my girlfriend’s house² and watched the remainder of the game on TV. It goes down as an all-time Fall Classic showcase. Bottom of the 10th. Derek Jeter homers off Byung-Hyun Kim for the win. Yankee Stadium goes bonkers.

And.

I.

Was.

Soooooooooo.

Happy.

Not.

To.

Be.

There.

Crazy, right? I was a Sports Illustrated baseball writer, giddy to be anywhere but the stadium. Why? A multitude of reasons. I hated the clubhouses. I hated media throngs. I hated the lame postgame questions, the lamer postgame answers. I didn’t care which team won, or who was the hero. I was there, with my beautiful and caring girlfriend, warm and snug beneath a blanket, content in my absence.

And that, legitimately, is why many ex-journalists turn ex-journalists: Shit gets stale. It’s the reasons husbands cheat on wives and wives cheat on husbands. It’s the reason Ben Affleck walked away from Batman and Tobey Maguire ditched Spiderman. It’s the reason Broadway plays are cancelled and TV series are put to death.

Shit. Gets. Stale.

One of my long-ago colleagues, Mike Morrissey, was an excellent baseball writer back when the New York Post ran an A-plus sports section. I’d see Mike often, and it always seemed as if he were made for the job. Then, in 2007, he just (poof!) vanished to go to law school.

I always wondered why.

“I covered roughly 1,000 Major League Baseball games in my career. I had no interest in covering another 3,000,” Mike told me. “One epiphany I had occurred around March 2006. I was assigned to cover some of the inaugural World Baseball Classic, and the paper was putting me up for a few days in Florida for a glorified exhibition. Airfare, hotel, rental car. While I still enjoyed baseball, I realized that this was a ridiculous waste of money by our perpetually unprofitable paper. More importantly, it occurred to me that I had to have better ways to spend the rest of my professional career. That set the wheels in motion for my next life chapter, which was a career in law. 

“I gave my boss my two weeks’ notice about two weeks before my first class at Fordham Law School. On my last night on the job, a number of my New York sportswriting colleagues shook my hand as I left the Shea Stadium press box. That was pretty cool.”

There’s something legitimately comforting in the realization that you’re no longer interested. It’s like Rose Dawson Calvert, 100-years-old and dying at the end of Titanic. You’ve seen what you’ve wanted to see, and now it’s time to chuck your ugly-ass necklace into the Atlantic and move on.³

So that’s what Mike Morrissey—who now works as an enforcement attorney for a self-regulatory organization in the securities industry—finally did.

“Do I miss staking out Yankee Stadium parking lots for people named Steinbrenner or New York hotels for the most recent free-agent signees?” he said “Do I miss writing on deadline as many as three times every night and weekend? Do I miss being told to call Brian Cashman on Christmas Day because a competitor has a scoop? Do I miss having a thoughtful sidebar idea axed in place of a 300-word story on the next day’s pitcher? No. No. No. No. Of course, when you’re at a big sporting event like a World Series, there’s a certain thrill of being “in the room where it happens,” if even as a neutral observer. There’s also a certain creativity you can only get from being a writer, and it was always a cool challenge trying to put a big event or some unique occurrence into context on deadline. But after I left, whenever I’d watch a big game that ended around midnight, I’d be thankful I didn’t have to work and stay up another two hours.”

Last June, a writing instructor named Roy Peter Clark wrote a piece for the Poynter Institute website headlined, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FORMER JOURNALIST.

The main point Roy tried to make was that journalism skills translate elsewhere. “The talents of ace reporters turn out to be in high demand,” he wrote. “Choose your field: marketing, public relations, advertising, public information, education, technology, the vast world of nonprofits, health care, law, fundraising, government at every level. If you have news judgment, if you are capable of critical thinking, if you are adept at in-depth research, if you can inhabit social networks. … Hey, I am making this too complicated: If you can read, think, write and talk, you may not wind up in the job you thought you wanted, but it may well be the job you now need, one that hints at a happier life.”

And it’s true. All of it. I’ve known plenty of journalists who would make amazing private investigators, amazing instructors, amazing speech writers. Steve Irvine, longtime Birmingham News sports writer, became a substitute teacher. Stephen Steenkamer, one-time staffer for the West Chester Daily Local News, manages a team of 17 writers and editors for Vanguard. Matthew Zimmerman, Long Beach Press-Telegram sports scribe, is the author of a journalism text book. Gregory Hardy, my fellow ESPN Page 2 columnist, started his own manuscript editing/social media/content strategy shop. Evan Korn, Newsday alum, went into PR. So did Steve Patterson of the Chicago Tribune and Sean Ryan, who wrote for a bunch of places. “I’d like to think my time in newsrooms made me more critical as a PR person,” Ryan said. “I didn’t want to bother editors and writers with non-stories. To this day, I ask myself before pitching a reporter: Am I wasting this person’s time?”

Truth be told, most of the people I spoke with seem genuinely content. They’ve uncovered fruitful careers away from the newsroom, and look at the scrambled egg mess of the industry with gratitude for having left. “The business just disintegrated,” said Josh Scroggin, a newspaper sports scrapper who now works in corporate communications. “I don’t regret any part of it because it all adds up to who I am today. I’m very happy now.”

That’s how this should end. Happy quote, happy sentiment, happy lives.

And yet …

There’s always an and yet.

Being a journalist never fully leaves a person.

I know that sounds like the cliched last line of a crap mid-1970s newspaper film, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. When one becomes a reporter, they change. Yes, they crave the texture of a notepad, the thrill of an electrifying quote, the high of breaking news.

The thing that really lasts, however, is the kinship.

We are all part of a collective; a class of workers who understand how the sausage is made. You can be an arch-conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal or a hard-left columnist for the New York Times, and the bond is real. You live for words, for phrasing, for that missing beat your story needs to leap from good to great to perfect. Many of us (myself included) chase the sound of a printing press. Many of us (myself included) have held newspapers to their noses to inhale the sweetest of perfumes.

There’s something about grabbing a drink at the nearby bar with your fellow scribes. There’s something about war stories—endless war stories. There’s something about sharing a byline. There’s something about …

All of it.

“Did I miss [journalism]?” asked Geoff Rivers, who left newspapers for teaching in the mid 1990s. “I did, and sometimes I still do. Anyone who has ever been charged with the police beat can attest to the joy that comes from finding an especially crazy police report. Or sitting around the newsroom coming up with awful headlines we knew would never make it in, just for laughs. My personal favorite: in Arizona at the time, the head of the Department of Education was a woman named C. Diane Bishop. When she was involved in a fender-bender, a guy I worked with came up with the memorably bad, dad-jokey headline, ‘Driver Didn't C. Diane Bishop.’ Maybe we were all punchy at the time, but that lead to five people laughing hysterically for five solid minutes.”

Only in journalism.

The Quaz Five with … Neal Boudette

Neal Boudette is a longtime journalist who covers automobiles for The New York Times. Which isn’t the whole story—he’s also (deep breath) a Boston University grad who moved to Germany as a Wall Street Journal staffer in the late 1990s, headed the European automotive beat (yup—an insanely cool gig), moved to Detroit because (duh) he writes about cars. He also co-wrote “The Making of a Miracle,” Mike Eruzione’s autobiography. You can follow Neal on Twitter here.

1. Neal, you cover the auto industry for the New York Times. My Toyota Prius recently set a Pearlman Family record by lasting 187,000 miles—which I was quite proud of. Is that even slightly impressive? And what's the most mileage you've ever seen/heard of on a vehicle? And what's the most you've put on one?: It’s moderately impressive by today’s standards. Years ago, before rust-proofing and improvements in the ways cars are engineered and designed, 187,000 miles would have been a big number. But the quality of cars today is so good that it’s fairly routine for cars to go 150,000 miles or more. You can see it in the average age of vehicles on the road – more than 12 years! – and it has been about 11 or more for more than a decade, because cars, SUVs and pickups can last a long time these days if you keep them well maintained. 12 years at 20,000 miles a year = 240,000 miles.So, sorry, Jeff, there are a lot of people out there over 200,000. I’m not one of them. I had a BMW several years back. I bought it with 50,000 and drove it to 1750,000. So your consolation prize is you outlasted me!

2. You co-authored Mike Eruzione's autobiography. I've always sorta dreaded the idea of teaming up on a book, because I like full editorial control. What are the goods and bads of co-authoring?: I can honestly say there was no bad in working with Mike. Mike’s not a writer and had no interest in attempting to be a writer. So we had a pretty clear division of labor. He talked; I wrote. I shaped it into the story that’s in the book. I would write a few chapters and send them to Mike, he would read them and then mostly send back factual fixes. There were only a few times where I had to change the way the story was told, and then it was really only a matter of dropping a sentence or paragraph. I tried to make the book sound like it was Mike telling the story, and I think we succeeded in that. I just saw Mike last week and he mentioned that – people tell him all the time they felt like they were listening to him tell it. I don’t think it’s that way with all authors and their co-authors. I was really fortunate to work with Mike. He's a great guy.

3. Would you say most automobile manufacturers view roadways filled exclusively with electric cars as the inevitable future? And are they happy about that, or devastated?: Totally not devastated. It took a while for Ford, GM and the others to be convinced that people really would buy electric cars, but now that they see that’s the way the industry is going, they are pedal to the metal. GM is spending $35 billion in the five years between 2021 and 2025 to develop EVs, build battery plants, and retool factories to make cars with no engines, no transmissions. Ford is actually ahead of GM and they’re doing electric versions of their most famous vehicles. There’s an SUV styled to look like a Mustang – called the Mustang Mach E – and it’s been out for a year. In April they’ll start building an electric version of the F-150 pickup, and the interest has been huge. Ford says they taken more than 200,000 reservations for the F-150 Lightning, as it’s called. So yes they see it as inevitable and no they are not devastated at all.

4. You're a Michigan guy. When I was covering the Majors Detroit was probably my least-favorite city to visit. Tell me what I'm missing.: Well, when you were covering the majors there was probably good reason Detroit was your least-favorite place. When I moved to the WSJ Detroit bureau in 2004, downtown Detroit looked like some war-torn country. Big, tall, 25 or 30 story office buildings empty and boarded up. The empty, decaying train station was a famous. Photographers used to go there to get shots of “ruin porn.” But slowly Detroit has been transformed. Comerica, Ford Field and Little Caesars Arena are all downtown. Swanky hotels have opened, there are hipster bars, tre chic restaurants. And Ford bought the old train station and is renovating it and turning it into a tech center. I go down there pretty regularly and it’s amazing how the city is coming back. It’s lively and fun. If you get a chance, check it out.

5. Rank in order (favorite to least): 1980 Datsun 510, Chet Lemon, paper towels, New York City cart vendor hot dogs, guava, Ted Nugent, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," the smell of newsprint, "Out of Africa," Kermit the Frog: While I live in the Detroit area, I’m not a native Michigander. I grew up in New Jersey, near NYC, and had family and close ties to Boston. So I’m a Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics, Pats fan. I was watching May 10, 1970, when Bobby Orr flew threw the air, had a red Steve Grogan jersey, and hated – HATED – the Yankees and Lakers. But to give you an answer, here goes: Malcom X, Kermit, newsprint, NYC “Sabrett” dogs, paper towels, Chet Lemon (actually I liked Mel Farr better), guava, Out of Africa, 1980 Datsun 510 (Datsun 280Z would be much higher), and that’s it. A dead-last ranking of 10 does not begin to reflect my distaste for Ted Nugent …

This week’s college writer you should follow on Twitter …

Jaylan Harrington senior at North Carolina State and editor in chief of The Technician.

I stumbled upon Harrington’s review of Adele’s latest release, and what I love love love love is Jaylan’s refusal to follow the herd and praise at will. It’s refreshing. Far too often we’re all required to emote similarly. So if a movie blows, everyone says it blows. If a play is magical, everyone raves over the magic.

Not Jaylan. Here, take a gander from ADELE MEANDERS, FLOUNDERS AND DROWNS IN MID-TIER ALBUM ‘30’ …

The best critics are willing to offer up unpopular takes. Big ups to Jaylan for doing so.

You can follow Harrington on Twitter here. Bravo, kid …

Yet another story of one of my myriad career fuckups …

I’m not entirely sure how to explain this picture.

So, admittedly, this probably shouldn’t be classified as a “career fuckup,” being that I was a mere 17-year-old high school junior. But, eh, it’s not a great look.

My job was sports reporter for the Chieftain, Mahopac High’s student newspaper. Thanks to a connection (not worth explaining here), I was able to secure an “exlusive”⁴ interview with Joe Bucchino, assistant general manager of the New York Rangers. It was a big deal. Mahopac was a Rangers town, our tiny paper rarely (well, never) landed major Q&As. So I prepared my questions, called “Mr. Bucchino” and spent 30 minutes chatting. He was friendly and engaging and …

Here’s the resulting story …

And here’s the nugget of information I saved for the (dear God) 11th paragraph …

Nothing to see here. Just an NHL executive for a major market team explaining how blacks don’t have the leg strength (“medically”) to make it in the league.

If Joe Bucchino spews such bullshit to any professional journalist, his career immediately comes to an end.

Fortunately (for him), the audience was a dumb high school kid with a bad haircut.

Random journalism musings for the week …

Musing 1: I know I’m an old man. Truly, I know I’m an old man. But when ESPN’s Elle Duncan Tweeted herself doing celebratory snow angels after Georgia beat Alabama for the national title—well, I vomited in my own mouth. Yes, it’s 2022. Yes, homerism is the thing. But I maintain we make choices in this business: Be a fan or be a journalist. You wanna root in the privacy of your living room? OK. Fine. You wanna do snow angels on the stadium turf, surrounded by confetti, wearing the pass you received because you work as a member of the media? No. No, no, no, no, no. It makes the lot of us look like amateurish fools (Also, not for nothing, but apparently Elle didn’t even attend the University of Georgia. Which makes this whole, “We did it!” thing extra confusing).

Elle Duncan @elleduncanESPN

My favorite snow angel! We’re champs

Musing 2: I do very little freelance these days, but I recently wrote—for free—this piece for the Examiner, a publication that covers my old haunting ground. The subject is a godless cretin named Tanya (Tatiana) Ibrahim, who is terrorizing teachers and school boards with her ignorant CRT rants.

Musing 3: Troubling piece in the Washington Post on the Iowa state senate banning journalists from the chamber floor, breaking a 140-year tradition. This move, decided by Republican leadership, is yet another blow to government transparency when we need (wait for it) government transparency. “Keeping reporters out doesn’t make reporters more accurate or fair. [Senators] would be better off letting those folks in and getting to know them,” said Kathie Obradovich, editor in chief of the Iowa Capital Dispatch, who also serves as vice president of the Iowa Capitol Press Association. She told the Post the switch was “discouraging.” Indeed.

Musing 4: Troubling news out of Kashmir, where journalist Sajad Gul has been arrested by authorities for posting an “objectionable” video on his social media handle. The Kashmir Press Club issued a statement demanding Gul’s release and noting, “While demanding an immediate release and dropping of charges against Gul, the club has further urged the authorities to create a conducive environment for journalists operating in Kashmir, free from threats, summons and arrests.”

Musing 5: Another excellent Washington Post piece on Fox News’ influence and access, RE: The Trump White House. I actually think it’s time we stop referring to people like Sean Hannity as “journalists.” They’re not. They’re unofficial advisers to the Republican Party.

Musing 6: Tommy Tomlinson is one of the truly great sports journalists of this era, and his newsletter is off-the-charts outstanding. Comes just once per week, filled with stuff you’ll be happy you knew. Subscribe here.

Musing 7: So Dan Shaughnessy, the great Boston Globe columnist, is catching some heat for only voting Jeff Kent on the newest Hall of Fame ballot. And while I don’t 100-percent agree (I’d probably go Curt Schilling and Todd Helton, too), he’s dead on about Kent, a ballplayer I covered frequently. Kent was an ornery pain in the ass. But the guy should have been in eons ago.

Musing 8: Tim Rosaforte, the veteran journalist, longtime Sports Illustrated golf scribe and one of the first television “insiders,” died yesterday after a brief battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 66. #RIP

Musing 9: Really great interview here with Tom Beer, Kirkus Reviews editor in chief and my former Newsday colleague.

Musing 10: You’re welcome …

Wu-Tang Is For The Children @WUTangKids

I love these two @7NewsMelbourne anchors and they have a few thoughts on the Novak Djokovic situation over there with the #AusOpen

Musing 11: This week’s Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast stars Jessie Sage, sex worker/writer. It’s a really unique, excellent chat with a one-of-a-kind scribe. Listen here.

Quote of the week …

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold

1. I’ve been told.

2. Now my wife.

3. A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.

4. No one else was calling.