Ben Domenech and Pulp Fiction

Know More: Web Journalism 2.0, Web Journalism

As you might have heard over and over again, Ben Domenech resigned from his new job at the Washington Post after bloggers discovered some plagiarized skeletons in his closet. Jay Rosen has the best take on the whole fiasco. I'd like to offer a quote from the story, "Penny-A-Worder" by Cornell Woolrich--a reflection on the self-destructive joy of writing for the vicious pulp fiction industry in the 1930's.

"The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thing gray ghosts, in good cause; the mortality rate was terrible."

Right now, the only successful writers are the ones who produce manic quantities of opinionated posts on the web. Our profession is in trouble. What if the ruined print industry actually produced blogging hacks like Domenech, handcuffing them to pulp fiction production schedules? I'm scared that ten years from now, thousands of frenzied writers will be publishing millions of disposable blog posts, all of us earning Depression-era salaries.

Before we spend another ounce of energy debating The Fall of Ben Domenech, we should look at the work culture that produced him. It's like Woolrich said, "the mortality rate was terrible."

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