"Meaghan Cunniff is 3 times the reporter that Karen Dorn is and was. There, I said it. It's out." - Jbelle
Yes, like an embarrassingly aromatic and remarkably auditory gaseous release squeaking with a jaw dropping SQUAAAWK against a heavily lacquered wood church pew in a silently praying congregation, it is out.
Local blogger and regular HBO Commenter, Jbelle, appears to again be mixing her Mimosas and Bloody Marys during her early morning HBO commentary. Dear God, what an overweening display of wrongheaded hubris. Gimme anosher mimosha, waiterrrr, I am not too drunk to blog! ...
Now, I like Meghann Cuniff's reporting, she's solid and very hardworking. I doubt she's yet written Hemingway's famous first million words of crap so the good stuff can then come out. She's still a very young reporter. And I have no doubt that even though she reads HBO and leaves the occasional comment, she must have missed this one or I would expect she would have simmered Jbelle's absurd remark down.
Karen Dorn Steele is a legend in Spokane and Northwest newspapering. She and her long time investigative reporter partner Bill Morlin just recently retired. They broke huge stories, did multi-part complex investigations, and blew stuff seriously up. Their expose of the late closeted gay mayor and online teenage boy surfer James West got them on Frontline on PBS. And ended West's term. Couldn't have happened to an ickier man.
I expect Cuniff knows deep down what a high bar has been set for her by Dorn Steele and Morlin at the Spokesman. When Dorn Steele and Morlin announced their retirement it was noted in the Seattle Times and other papers - they were recognized by their peers as two heavy hitters in the world of investigative reporting. Meghann's young and hasn't broken anything really huge yet, hasn't produced any multi-part deeply investigative report series, hasn't created a body of work that will get her mentioned in the Seattle Times when she retires. But she's still new at the game.
I respect two newspaper lions retiring while they still had the chops unlike local hack columnist Doug Clark who almost gleefully writes the same crappy column from the mid eighties over and over, recycling lame puns, claiming he's coined words like "boink fest" that a simple google search shows has been used forever, and in this piece of shit, even makes a crack pipe joke! Clark has a profound, sneering disregard for the reader, it's clear in every column he hacks out, so many years past his prime that his output has become like the results of a creative writing project in an assisted care center. Doug, show us your ceramics and tole painting, too! God, what a puke.
And Paul Turner, whose formulaic "The Slice" column grows increasingly crotchety, moribund and despondent, like relentless dispatches from a therapy group of geriatric chronic depressives. God, Paul, either cheer it the fuck up or do something else. "Here’s how to annoy entertainer Bernadette Peters if you see her around town this weekend" was an actual topic in his latest. Seriously.
A recent "Slice question" for his readers was "Which Spokane bridge is your favorite?" I'm only guessing, but I wonder if his editor red lined out "to consider a plummet to your death in the rocky river below while hopefully taking a local mental health professional with you?"
The only decent columnists they have left are John Blanchette, Cindy Hval, and Rich Landers. Their best overall literary writer is probably Shawn Vestal who's had short stories published, including in McSweeney's.
Anyhow, I suspect the Spokesman-Review is on its last legs anyway, like so many other papers, and that would be a shame. I grew up reading it, delivering it from a canvas newspaper bag slung over my shoulders while riding my gold stingray bike at 430 in the morning, and I still hit the online version to keep up on my hometown while out-stationed here in Rainytown, Pugedopia.
I don't even know how many of the young Turks and Turkettes like Cuniff are even going to get a career long enough to build the resume of a Dorn Steele. It's a changing of the guard but I don't think anyone even knows to what yet.
Meanwhile, let's all learn from JBelle's noxious blast and remember after the third Bloody Mary at 830 in the morning anything that gets typed on the internet might just end up being mocked in somebody's blog. That, folks, is the crazy new journalism where anyone with a computer can type crap up and launch it into the vast ether-wasteland. I'm living proof. ;-)
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