Calling yourself a journalist doesn't mean you are one

I am not good enough to draw this

Lots and lots of people call themselves journalists. That's like me drawing a stick figure and calling myself an artist.

I can't draw. And way too many of today's "journalists" have no business saying what they do is journalism.

Like this tired, here-we-go-again piece from the March 12, 2014 edition of SF Weekly, "Exit Music: Musicians Are Leaving San Francisco. Can the City's Legendary Scene Survive?

The issue is that good journalism is more than just assembling a bunch of links together and forming an opinion about it. Or taking a photograph or video on a smartphone and posting it to Twitter. Or writing a blog.

But that's what a lot of today's "journalists" think journalism is. 

Good journalism needs context and perspective and a sense of history and knowledge of what came before today. Good journalism also needs editors who can provide a check on the rampant egocentrism that most journalists--real ones and pretend ones--are known to have.

Good journalism also needs originality. But here, in San Francisco, where all the millennials consider themselves to be a *something* (writer, artist, musicians, poets, entrepreneurs) despite a decided lack of experience and credentials, there is also rampant parroting of the same old themes.

Photo courtesy HuffingtonPost

It goes something like this. No, wait. It goes exactly like this: "Musicians and artists are leaving San Francisco, and so am I, and the city I have lived in for 31 months *will never be the sameeeeeeee*"

Like "The San Francisco Exodus" in TheAtlanticCities.com

Like the nauseating "Goodbye San Francisco, You're a Passionate Lover," that ran a few months ago in HuffPost.

Like "Ty Segall and John Dwyer on Why So Many Musicians Are Leaving San Francisco for L.A." (Full disclosure: I have no idea who Ty Segall and John Dwyer are, and I bet nobody will in 10 years, either).

Like this ai-yi-yi-yi piece (count the number of times the writer writes the words "I" or "me"): "Dave Eggers, The Circle and Why I’m Leaving the Bay Area."

But the best one is this, from the San Francisco Chronicle: "Heading Out of Town / Artists leave San Francisco for less expensive digs in New York, Los Angeles and even Wonder Valley."

You know why it's the best? Because if you check the timestamp, it was written in 2000.

If I could draw me right now, I would draw this. From this site

And that's the point. Things have always changed. This is nothing new. These woe-is-me-because-me-is-all-who-matters dollops of drivel have no perspective, no context, no sense of history, and no sense of wonder.

However, the lazy narrative has been "Oh no, damned gentrification, we'll never be the same." 


The city is changing because musicians and artists are leaving? Because all the good places are closing? Well, there are plenty of new ones, too: Brick and Mortar, Amnesia, the Chapel, the New Parish...

I will always mourn the absence of, say, the Stone, the Keystone, the Avalon, Winterland, Wolfgangs, the I-Beam, the Longbranch and Keystone Berkeley, and on and on and on. It's a shame they had to close.

A real journalist would know those things, because a real journalist would do some real research. And perhaps that real research would be demanded by an editor who wouldn't allow the same thing to be written over and over and over again. 

I'll call them journalists when they do real journalism.

Then again, maybe if they call me an artist, I'll change my mind.