A recipe for a pissed-off newspaper reporter: Take a few months to write an interesting and worthwhile series on an important local topic. See it published, to substantial local acclaim. Then, two days later, see another newspaper reporter sweep in and steal your story — writing the same piece as if it were his own, interviewing the same people, and generally ripping you off. I’d be pissed off, too:
“Rick Bragg of The New York Times, who lives in New Orleans, read our series and went to the exact same place and did the exact same story — same dateline, same folks interviewed, same themes, etc. To his credit, he did note our series in his story in a general way. But this still feels a little fishy to me — Bragg is a fine writer, but if you are spinning something off someone else’s work, doesn’t journalism etiquette dictate you try to go in a slightly different direction, or at least cover your tracks a little?”
Bragg’s piece, while as usual enjoyable and well written, still has my least favorite Bragg tic: treating residents of Louisiana as mystical swamp creatures so incredibly strange as to be barely human. “Like the other people here, his accent is Cajun, more music than language” — we don’t even speak, we sing! It’d be okay if Bragg mixed up his Cajuns-as-swamp-unicorn schtick with some serious reporting — he does, after all, work for the New York Times. But nope — it’s all cliched atmosphere, one story after another. When there’s real reporting in a story, like this one, it’s ripped off from the local daily. Harrumph.
(And no, my Bragg animus doesn’t just come from the fact I want his job. Really. Okay, maybe a little.)