Before we let this bone go, indulge another posting on the Ramiro Burr-Douglas Shannon affair.

For the sake of accuracy, we must acknowledge that our profession has had a long, sad history of publishing ghost-written columns.

Consider a parenthetical before a 1949 entertainment column in the L.A. Times:

("While Hedda Hopper is in Europe her column is being compiled and written by her Hollywood staff.")

Might Mr. Burr have been better served by sharing a byline ... or by warning in parens "When I'm blocked or too lazy to come up with my own prose this column will be compiled and written by someone I rely on and respect but would just as soon not identify"?

Contact Lovell at glovell@aol.com

I'm feeling a little lonely today. Perhaps someone out there can relate: I work for a newspaper that just went berserk because the hometown college baseball team won the NCAA championship.

And I just can't get caught up in the hype.

I know I live in a journalistic world in which sports coverage is king. (And that cultural/arts coverage is a mere deputy earl or something.) And I know that a sizable number of folks in my community are really excited that the Fresno State Bulldogs won. Most are convinced that the rest of the country is awestruck at this mighty "accomplishment." (Never mind that when the baseball season started, the Fresno State team couldn't draw much of a crowd at its home games.) This is the insular nature of sports fandom -- that an underdog win like this  truly is a "historic event." People forget that there are champions every year in a number of different sports, and there's always an underdog story waiting to pop up and fulfill the "dream season" template.

OK, so let the fans have their fun, right? Let them have their bragging rights and their homecoming parade. But I wonder: Is there any limit to how far the local newspaper should go in stoking this hoopla? My paper wiped out the front page and made it into a big photo of the team. I guess I can live with that in the name of sports boosterism. But The Bee didn't even provide a "second" front page inside with real news inside. Not even a special top-of-the-news summary. Instead, the second page was the usual People/Celebrity news and the third page had a big ad.

I hopped on a train recently to visit a friend who left her staff job a few years ago to have kids. Now that she's about to go back to work full-time, she's thinking -- as anyone familiar with the state of the field would be -- of dumping arts journalism for something else.

A chance comment made by an editor quoted in one of these posts a few weeks ago is still nagging at me. Some readers of the Sacramento Bee were disappointed that an opera review was posted online but didn't run in the print edition. Tom Negrete, the managing editor, said the omission was the result of miscommunication. Still, Negrete says that there will be changes in the paper's review philosophy:

Reviews still will be printed in the paper, he said, particularly of shows with multiple performances.

What he wants to stop are reviews of one-night stands, where a performer or event are long gone by the time the review is published.

On the surface, that sounds perfectly reasonable, right? Why waste space for a performance that won't repeat?

Let's answer that with just two words: sports section. 

I don't know Ramiro Burr, I don't know his work, and I don't know whether he "caused the [San Antonio] Express-News to unknowingly publish work under his name that was not, in fact, his own work," as the newspaper's editor, Robert Rivard, said -- though Burr's resignation from the paper Tuesday, complete with squishy pseudo-apology, certainly suggests that its ethics investigation marshaled damning evidence against him. Whether it did or not, and with all due respect to Sasha, I must point out one thing I do know: Journalists don't get ghostwriters. That is simply not part of the deal.

When the Poynter Institute's Romenesko runs a news item about critics, well, it jumps out at you. Many have probably already seen this, but just in case you have not, it's worth poynting out:

Ramiro Burr, an esteemed music critic and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, resigned Tuesday in the face of an ethics investigation. A former intern of his -- Douglas Shannon, who had worked with Burr at a music PR firm -- alleges that he ghost-wrote more than 100 stories and columns for Burr since 2001. 

  "I may have been a little overzealous, or overreached in trying to be the best reporter/syndicated columnist I could be," award-winning Burr said in his statement of resignation. "I sincerely apologize for breaking any rules."

Burr's Latin Notes blog and the 20 years he's spent focusing journalism attention on Latin music have brought attention and understanding and appreciation to that genre. Interestingly, and you should read the full story, Shannon and his lawyers appear to be only seeking to get credit, retroactive credit. And, Shannon made this curious remark:

 "I'm [also] disappointed that the Express-News didn't notice the changes in the work he was turning in between 2001 and 2003. Unfortunately, Burr's ethics violations were not isolated slip-ups but were repeated, frequent, and continued over a significant period of time. I hope readers and researchers will continue to peruse and benefit from Mr. Burr's work, especially his pieces from the 1980s and 1990s."

So, the ghost writer appears to be hurt that the Express-News editors did not detect a difference between what Burr wrote and what Shannon wrote. Hmmmmm...aren't good ghost writers supposed to blend in, be invisible? That's why they are ghosts?

Months back Hillary Clinton (or was it Bill, or another primary candidate?) attacked Barack Obama as a mere purveyor of words. Obama (borrowing, it turned out, from his friend Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts) responded that words do count, words mean something important. Without too great a stretch, I want to extrapolate that idea to arts journalism, and the need for same.

Recently I had an e-mail exchange with Greil Marcus, who was editing an entry on "Porgy and Bess" that I had written for a Harvard anthology. The last issue to be considered between us was whether in one sentence "African-Americans" or "blacks" worked better.

I finally decided I didn't much care, ending with "Let's move on to curing cancer, solving world peace, electing Obama and like that." Greil replied: "Don't you realize that the right choice between 'blacks' and 'African-Americans,' whatever it is, is the SAME THING as curing cancer, solving world peace, and electing Obama? Where's your sense of proportion?"

Point taken. Words do matter. Even the words, the futile scribblings, of arts critics. Take away words, take away critical commentary on the arts, and the arts lose something crucial to their creation and, especially, their reception. So think of that the next time you set out to solve world peace, arrogantly indifferent to mere words, or the arts. 

A great deal of what I'm about to convey is available in the Joe Levy comment on my original entry regarding Jim DeRogatis and R. Kelly just below. But not everybody reads comments, and my command of the facts in that entry was so partial that I thought it best to pass along the Bill Wyman email copied in full below. Wyman was a colleague and radio partner of DeRogatis in Chicago for many years. He  makes clear what I didn't know, which is that Kelly's claims of DeRogatis's hostility were based on DeRogatis's investigative reporting. He also suggests that the ploy of making him testify is intended partly to trap DeRogatis in the quicksand of child pornography laws. This is an important story I hope arts journalists with regular beats pick up.

Forgive this mass email but I wanted to bring your attention to what's going on with reporter Jim DeRogatis in the R. Kelly case.

The judge has ruled he must testify. Jim didn't show up for court today, and the judge threatened to put him in jail. The judge ultimately backed down, but reiterated he wanted to see Jim in court tomorrow. I have no inside information, but I assume that if Jim doesn't show up tomorrow the judge will issue a warrant for his arrest.

You can read the background details on my blog, at Hitsville.org, or in this piece on the Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-wyman/what-if-they-jailed-a-rep_b_104979.html

Jim and the Sun-Times can take care of themselves, of course, but I think it's odd how little attention this case has gotten.

Jim is invariably referred to as a music critic; that's true, as far as it goes, but in fact his original piece on R. Kelly's sexual proclivities was a fine piece of investigative journalism. At heart, it was about a path of destruction wrought by a sexual predator through the lives of who knows how many young Chicago girls.

The tape that came to him was part of his investigative work and should not be subject to judicial scrutiny; there are legal implications for Jim, and while there is little chance that he will be forced to reveal sources per se the judge has already said he may be forced to turn over notes as well.

My request: Please keep an eye on this case, and pass this note along to along to anyone you know who might bring more public attention to a case that's not getting enough.

Best,

Bill

billwyman@gmail.com

hitsville.org

Update: Behind the story yet again (I'll never be a real blogger), I am informed though haven't been able to fully confirm that DeRogatis did appear in court without the jury present for 10 minutes during which, citing Illinois shield laws as well as the First and Fifth Amendments, he declined to answer most or all questions. The judge then told him he would not need to testify but insisted he turn over notes from an interview with another witness, which the Sun-Times then ran in full. Here's a good link.

I've been teaching arts journalism for the first time. Let me offer a small antidote to the sadness in our field -- as jobs shrivel, as doubt takes root -- in the form of a first impression that could seem naive to teachers with years behind them.

My office was filled yesterday as students, one after another, showed me work in progress. They asked for help with interviews and research, hoping to give some convincing form to their passions for opera, quilting, roller derbies, "green" weddings, sustainable design. I'm lucky, because they have no trouble understanding that with the right approach, weddings and roller derbies may share the same tent as Messiaen or Conceptual art.

I met these curious young women and men just a few weeks ago, and I know little about them. But very soon I saw that we all have the same queer urge to condense ourselves into words, into stories. Although they slouch and tease and pretend otherwise, they're yearning, absolutely yearning, to be read.

Writers with this kind of compelling need will demand readers -- create them if necessary. Of course I'm worried that my students' more traditional newspaper and magazine dreams will elude them. But after yesterday, I had a hunch that most would set their ambition on any number of promising platforms -- just as long as they could write.  

This is mostly to let the NAJP community know that the current issue of Jason Gross's long-running online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever was guest-edited by myself and consists entirely of papers I've gotten from my students at Princeton and especially NYU over the past three years. I wrote an intro that explains how the issue came about that you can click on if you're interested. But for NAJP-ers I should emphasize that perhaps half of these students have much interest in a writing career--the four from Princeton, who took a seminar entitled "Cultural Journalism" with me last fall, and maybe two or three of my NYU students, all of whom (except one special enrollee) are musos preparing for careers in the music business in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music. Moreover, most of the NYU students were/are only sophomores for whom my Artists and Audiences class is a requirement that's supposed to teach them to both read and write about popular music. I've found that these students, as musos, describe music with a fluency few rock critics achieve even in this period, when most who write about music also dabble (or much more) in performance. Some come in with a measure of stylistic ease, but most have to be shown how, which I regard as being as much about the readings I assign as the detailed editing I do on the two papers (of 250 and 750 words) that precede these, all but one of which were 2500-word final papers. Interesting how many pick it up when given the chance.

As far as I'm concerned, most of these papers are at least as interesting as almost anything I read in the professional press--not for the most part absolutely top quality, but well above the churned-out norm. And if you'll glance at the mag's archive, you'll find more of equal quality. Nobody in PSF is paid a penny, including Jason Gross, an NAJP member who would qualify as an arts journalist even if he didn't freelance for actual cash money on occasion--and who has a day job with the Audobon Society.