If there is one thing that drives me nuts -- batty even -- is cliches, tired and derivative ideas, and unoriginality. The biggest culprit of this, it seems to me, is the media. Pack journalism, or "piggybacking" is a disturbing trend practiced by one too many and eschewed by too few. Often, those who indulge in the hack-styled, baseline reporting are trying to get finished with their work so they can move on to something else that, typically, is social in nature. Now I have no problem with that, but if you're going to play hard, work hard. Come on, who grew up wanting to be a big-league writer or reporter just so they could go out there and hack it up?
Here's my credo: When given an opportunity to do something creative and get paid for it, dive on top of it like you're trying to smother a grenade that is about to kill your wife. The fact that people in the media are blessed with the opportunity to be creative and original for a living, is colossal when compared to what normal people must do at their jobs. For most people, the only creative outlet they get each day is deciding what to order for lunch.
Anyway, I wrote a preseason story about the Phillies, which, not so subtly attacked this notion. At the same time, I twisted the knife into my own carcass because I shamelessly used the same very premise I was attacking. Kind of ironic, heh?
Still, it is my goal to take a different view of everything when it comes to writing and reporting. In fact, it's gotten to the point where I refuse to re-use concepts I may have trotted out years ago during another time and circumstance. My pursuit of freshness is so intense that it's one and done for every idea. But from what I can tell, this isn't something that is practiced by other media types. This is especially true of those who work in television where cliches aren't frowned upon, they're cravenly embraced like a stuffed animal won at the ring-toss booth of at a carnival.
OK, so I'm better than everyone else, right? Wrong. It's just that I find myself getting in less trouble when I choose to follow my own ideas, thoughts and creativity than if I write the nuts-and-bolts story. See, it's selfish. Sure, it's extra work and a lot of times the ideas miss, but at least I'll never be called unoriginal.
Alright, here's the story. Incidentally, I received a lot of positive response to it so I guess people enjoyed the joke.
Then again, maybe they just like reading about baseball.