Boy, the one week I don’t grab the City Paper from the newsstand and Chris Potter writes this:

This morning, for example, I opened up my Post-Gazette to the Forum section’s “Cutting Edge” feature. Cutting Edge offers a weekly wrap-up of the posts from the wonderfully diverse world of Pittsburgh blogging. But I wasn’t exactly surprised to see, yet again, an excerpt from a post by the Burgh Blog‘s ubiquitious “PittGirl” — who’s been mentioned in the weekly column three times the last month, and who has been the subject of a P-G profile.

PittGirl is a fun read, and while we here at CP prefer our prose to be jingoistic and shrill — it’s an old lefty tradition — I certainly don’t begrudge her success. If anything, I hope she’s billing the P-G for providing them with so much copy. Maybe there’s a PG/KDKA-style “media partnership” in the offing. The paper’s Bill Toland was just featured on her site … proving yet again that the “Burghosphere” is just like the Burgh itself: Everybody seems to know everybody else.

Even if PittGirl doesn’t get paid, I can’t complain. City Paper has been running a “best of the blogs” feature for awhile, as has the Tribune-Review. So while I might question just how cutting-edge “Cutting Edge” really is, I certainly couldn’t fault its treatment of contributors.

My thoughts:

1. Chris Potter!  Are you saying I am NOT shrill?!  How dare you?  I can be very shrill!

2.  I have never made one cent off of this blog or anything related to this blog.  Not. One. Cent.  In fact, I have never been paid one dime for my writing in my life.  Not. One. Dime.

What the hell’s wrong with me?

3.  Although I might be mistaken, I’m pretty sure Carbolic and 2 Political Junkies have been featured just as much, if not more than this blog in The Cutting Edge column.

4.   Outside of a few emails, I don’t know Bill Toland and he doesn’t know me.

Then:

The P-G‘s obsessive attention to PittGirl, for example, comes across not as an effort to introduce newspaper readers to her blog … but as an attempt to introduce her blog’s readers to the newspaper.

Heh.  “Obsessive attention.”  Right, the PG is obsessed with me like David Conrad is obsessed with me.  Not even a little bit.

Then Bram commented at the bottom of the article:

I will say that The Burgh Blog is the most consistent, the most fullsome and fair-voiced, and the most broadly enjoyable blog I know.

Aw.  Too kind.

So to sum up:

I have no control, agreement, contact with the PG other than my occasional emails with some staffers.  I also have occasional email conversations with staffers at the Trib, WPXI, WTAE, and KDKA.  I’m a fair news junkie.  If someone from the City Paper would like to be my email buddy, feel free to contact me and tell me in specific detail how awesome I am.  OMG, I’m just kidding.

And because this blog is not my job or my life, I absolutely do not care if the PG or any news outlet decides to reprint portions of my stuff.  Maybe someday if they’re just running entire blog posts verbatim on a daily basis, I’ll demand payment.

In the form of Dunkin Donuts coffee.  Or Sonic Gift cards.

Or diamonds.

Category: Local media | March 28, 2008 | | ShareThis