David Simon trashes awards mentality at SPJ awards in St. Paul

"No difference to them between selling journalism and selling bran flakes"

David Simon, creator of "The Wire," spoke at the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalism's Page One awards ceremony Friday, May 21. For those of us who couldn't afford the $40-50 tickets, here's the video. Go to the 2:40 mark to skip the introduction by Neal Justin of the Star Tribune and get right to Simon's speech.

(Simon answers questions)

Simon uses the opportunity to trash the awards mentality: "I'm going to believe that all of these were won by people who were doing organic journalism who didn't give a fucking thought to what they were going to submit for a prize."

He makes an argument based on his experience at the Baltimore Sun that beat-based journalism keeps reporters and the journalism industry honest:

"The best reporters were pulled off. In a city where the unions were being devoured, the working class was being destroyed, we ceased to have a labor reporter. In a city where case work was starting to collapse because the police department was in dysfunction, we no longer covered the courthouse where those cases washed up. We no longer had a poverty reporter in one of the most impoverished cities in America, we didn't cover the Clinton cutbacks [to the social service net] in any systemic way. Those beats were all gone."

On careerists:

"They came in from some other city because it was a chain, and they looked upon the city of Baltimore not as a place to be covered, to look upon as your terrain something you need to own and understand as journalists, they looked upon it as the place they were going to spend the next three years and they were going to win enough prizes to get somewhere else."

How to save journalism

Content: "You can't save it by trying to tell people your newspaper is their friend or that you're going to help them with the little problems in life or some better ways of presenting your bullshit... what matters is that you cover the city."

Pay Walls: Should go up to prop up revenue model, starting with New York Times and Washington Post (assuming those two companies aren't part of a conspiracy to kill regional papers, Simon says).