It seems New Times’ Chow Bella editor Amy Silverman is miffed with MXSW and its sole employee. A little ill will is not surprising. It must have been downright embarrassing to be scooped on the departure of her own dining critic last year. And scooped on the hiring of her current one. Or maybe it’s all the other MXSW scoops that manage to elude her stable of a dozen-plus food and drink writers.
Whatever the irritant, her gripe du jour, expressed in her new blog post “Mouth by Southwest’s Jess Harter Has a Long History of Mixing Editorial and Advertising,” apparently is that I don’t meet her definition of a “journalist” because, according to her, there has to be a wall between advertising and editorial such that they, in her words, “never talk to each other.”
By her decree, I can’t write stories and sell ads for my one-person site. I guess she requires that I hire someone to sell the ads (and never talk to that person). I disagree, of course, as do hundreds of other one-person digital journalism startups popping up across the country. So do an increasing number of forward-thinking journalism experts, who see her view as antiquated.
She establishes my “long history” by dredging up a Clinton-era gossip column – anonymously written by one of her New Times colleagues – that quotes a writer I had just fired from Get Out magazine, of which I was the publisher at the time. She notes that I oversaw both editorial and advertising. Of course, every publisher does. That’s the definition of the title. I’m not sure why that bugs her.
Silverman at least reprints my ethics policy in her screed. I’m sure she found it easily enough – after all, it’s prominently listed right at the top of every page on MXSW. She doesn’t try to claim I violated any of it. Probably because I haven’t. Ironically, I can’t find any policies governing Chow Bella’s ethics on its site. Which begs the question: Are they hiding them, or do they not have any?
