Monday, June 20, 2005

Links by the Bushel, Ink by the Barrel, or a case of Scotch by UPS Knoxville MetroPulse newspaper publisher Brian Conley apologized Monday to blogger South Knox Bubba for sending e-mail messages that appeared to threaten to expose Bubba's true identity and jeopardize his business. After Bubba (or SKB) posted his real name and address on his website this weekend, along with Conley's e-mail, bloggers rushed to SKB's defense from coast to coast and left to right; that is, from Atrios to Instapundit and many points between. The bloggers and blog readers generated hundreds of comments, Web links and presumably many angry e-mail messages to the publisher -- who coincidentally has just launched a city magazine and is pursuing major downtown development projects. His apology sounds sincere, if two days late. (I tried to summarize the origin of the whole back-and-forth yesterday, but probably didn't do it justice. Details are still at SKB, if you have time for about 100 pages of reading.) So far, the best line I've seen come out of this mess is this comment on Bubba's site today, signed "~m": "Remember: Never pick fights with people who get their links by the barrelful." For non-journalism, non-politics folks who don't get the joke, the usual line is, "Never pick fights with someone who buys ink by the barrel." But who said it? Roughly the same quote has circulated on the Web for years as "Greener's Law" in a computer file of badly-attributed sayings. Elsewhere, Google can find it attributed to four centuries of politicians, writers and others: from Samuel Johnson, Ben Franklin, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, William Randolph Hearst, Will Rogers, H.L. Mencken and Lane Kirkland, to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Elizabeth Dole... and to an anonymous author of "old Chinese proverbs." For all I know, Gutenberg said it first. More recently, the old quote has come to mind in other new-media/old-media exchanges, warning of the power of--not ink by the barrel--but: "...bandwidth by the barrel" (2002) "...pixels by the bushel" (2003) "...photons by the google" (2004) "...diskspace by the gigabyte" (2005) and, for the online elite... "...someone whose Technoratis are two orders of magnitude bigger than yours." (2004) Then there's this strange shift in metaphor attributed to Lennie Lower, Australian journalist and comedian: "You can't win in a pissing contest with people who drink ink by the barrel." Drink ink? Maybe in Australia... Around here, South Knox Bubba and friends have a sworn preference for "a good single malt Scotch whiskey for around $20" -- which would be quite acceptable (and almost affordable) to many print journalists I've known. And what could be better than a $20 bargain bottle? Perhaps a free case of the stuff... delivered by a sincerely apologetic newspaper publisher. 8:34:31 PM    comment []

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