The Editor's Desk

“The Editor’s Desk” won second place in Best Overall Blog in the 2007 Society for Professional Journalists Inland Southern California chapter award ceremony.

I’d complain that I deserve first place, but that award was taken by my newsroom compatriots in the “Off the I-15” blog.

While it would be nice to crow about what a distinction this is, I think the reality is that newspapers, particularly editorial writers, have been slow to get on board the blog train. Or maybe they’re just reluctant to make a big deal out of them, given it’s still an evolving form? The Press-Enterprise won a ton of awards at the ceremony, and has quite a few blogs, but didn’t win any awards in that area. I wonder if they even entered.

Also, an experiment of mine failed. Way back when I was in college, I posited a theory that if you wrote about being gay in your English composition classes, you would automatically get an A. This turned out to be pretty true for me and some gay college friends of mine (to be fair, I got A’s on most of my essays though, so perhaps correlation doesn’t imply causation).

I thought I would try the experiment again for the individual blog essay competition. I sent in my essay on National Coming Out Day back from back in October. I got beaten by two essays about housing market issues and one about crime by Kate Rosenberg, formerly of the Daily Press in Victorville, now of the Lucerne Valley Leader.

The loss could mean several things — the most obvious is that it’s no longer much of a surprise to find out somebody is gay, particularly in the media. It’s not as big a deal as it was 10 or 20 years ago. It also probably wasn’t my strongest essay. I considered sending in my piece on how I became a libertarian instead, a stronger blog essay that talks about my thought processes as an editorial writer.

I also submitted one of my editorials about rental inspections in a print category. It didn’t win, nor did I really expect it to. I’ve noticed that libertarian editorials that hinge on the idea of setting boundaries for government behavior tend to not be rewarded. I suspect media judges don’t find it particularly inspiring to read pieces telling the government to stop doing things, unless these things are causing obvious physical harm to citizens. I think the editorials I do write are about issues that are important to residents to Barstow, but they lack a certain level of flash due to my reluctance to grandstand.

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