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Date Posted: 12:05:58 01/25/05 Tue
Author: No name
Subject: Re: feminist backlash
In reply to: 's message, "Re: feminist backlash" on 11:10:20 01/25/05 Tue

>>Face facts: if AW wasn't a strong, ass-kicking woman,
>>most of this whining psychobabble would slow to a
>>dribble. The bottom line, from someone who worked with
>>her for years, is this: if you worked hard, relished
>>journalism, produced good, solid stories and gave as
>>good as you got -- you got along with Allison. If you
>>didn't, god help you. Newsrooms aren't for the faint
>>of heart. The pay sucks, the hours are unpredictable
>>at best and the pressure is enormous. It takes a
>>strong stomach and an iron-clad will to survive. But
>>most of all, you gotta love what you do. And there's
>>no one out there who can ever say that AW didn't love
>>newspapers. She got as excited over a big fat story as
>>the reporter breaking it. If it was worth it, she
>>fought for it -- and for the reporter. She had balls.
>>To survive -- as a 5-2 woman in an often poisonous,
>>male-dominated corporate stew -- she had to. And that,
>>my dears, is what really did her in. Balls. Plain and
>>simple as a first year nut graph.
>
>
>Oy. Now I've heard it all.

It's a romantic portrait: The fireball woman railing against middle-aged white guys in the big bad corporate world finally getting done in by her own brassiness. Pity the fallen heroine. But those who know Allison also know the fact from the fiction.
You can't argue that she was a bright woman with a badger's taste for the jugular and a passion for journalism that would match a New York City sewer rat's lust for an alley cat's blood. But what did her in was not balls but bombast. There's no doubt that the T-L did good journalism under Allison's stewardship, but there also is no doubt that the newspaper did a lot of bad journalism as well. As the paper's news hole shrunk over the years, so did the level of creativity from the top, culminating in the hideous and unimaginative SAYSO line that flies in the face of everything that decent journalism is supposed to represent. With her hatchet man Iseman in tow, Walzer took the tenets of Schectman, Sheehan, Shurmaitis and the ilk and stood them on their collective head. Those were good journalists. Mark Guydish? Lane Filler? Puh-leeze.
In the end, it was poor newspapering in various incarnations that appears to have done in Allison Walzer. The bad form of dancing on someone's grave notwithstanding, it didn't happen a moment too soon.

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