D Magazine : The Front Burner

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RE: THE OTHER SIDE OF JIM SCHUTZE

Jim Schutze responds--and makes it even more personal, which I love. [rubbing hands together, bouncing in my chair] Let's dig right in:

For now, I'm not going any further on the specifics of the Trinity issue. This and Jim's response pretty much say what there is to say.

Today, I'd like to address the more fun stuff that springs from Jim's post. For instance, he writes:

[The Trinity Project] is a huge, complex story that I have covered for almost 10 years, dating from when I was Dallas bureau chief for the Houston Chronicle. Tim's idea of an investigation was to call Rebecca Dugger, the city bureaucrat in charge of the project, and allow her to write him in an e-mail message about it.

Well, no, that's not my idea of an investigation. It's my idea of a blog post. It was a quick, clear way to refute the misinformation on the Trinity Project that Jim continues to spread. And, sure, Rebecca Dugger is a bureaucrat. Any time you're working with hundreds of millions of the public's dollars, you're going to have a bureaucracy, and you'll need someone to run it. That's a bureaucrat. Rocco Petrone was a bureaucrat, too. He directed the Apollo space program. If I had a question about landing on the moon (and if Petrone hadn't died last month), I would ask him.

Jim writes:

It’s disturbing to me that a D editor would write about this project in such hortatory tones without making what I think is an important and absolutely requisite disclosure--that D has published at least one entire "advertorial" edition of the magazine promoting this project. For those of you who aren't familiar with that term, it means D sold ads to the contractors and other people who will make money off of this project and wrapped those ads around laudatory articles--ad copy, really--extolling the benefits of the project. In my opinion, D sold its integrity on this issue when it sold that edition.

"Hortatory" is a really good word. I confess I had to look it up. I'm going to use it three times today so I can add it to my vocabulary.

But our special issue on the Trinity wasn't advertorial. Just to be clear. We did extol the benefits of the project. There are many benefits: improved flood control, wetlands that encourage biodiversity, new soccer fields, an immense public park. And, as Jim says, the Trinity Project is a huge, complex story. We spent many words and many pages explaining the entire thing, how three aspects of the project--transportation, flood control, and park amenities--interrelate to yield a whole greater than the sum of its parts. And, yes, we sold ads. Just like the Observer, D Magazine is a for-profit enterprise.

But advertorial, as Jim knows, is copy written about the people and businesses who buy the ads. The advertisers get to approve the copy. When D Magazine does this--there's an advertorial piece about urban condos in our September issue, for instance--we are always careful to label it "Special Advertising Section." That wasn't the case with our Trinity issue. No advertiser saw the copy before it was published. And, in fact, none of the copy was about any advertiser. It was about the river.

Okay, now the most fun part. In conclusion, Jim writes:

I think I need to put this in an even more personal context. Less than 24 hours before this piece appeared on FrontBurner, Rogers wrote to me finally conceding the fact that I was not going to accept his repeated offers of employment at D, which he has made in person and by e-mail over a period of a year or more. During this time, I tried my best to be diplomatic about why I belong only at the Dallas Observer and would never consider working for a publication like D.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two times when Jim did more than consider working for a publication like D. In February 1992, he wrote our (wonderful) cover story, about the death of the Times Herald. (At the time, I was an intern for the magazine.) And in April 1995, Jim wrote our (insightful) cover story about Ron Kirk. (Jim was a contributing editor to the magazine.)

I'm sure what Jim meant to say was he would never consider working for a publication like D Magazine as long as he's got another job.

Now, about those "repeated offers of employment": hell yes. If the Observer's New York bosses ever fire Jim (see: Sam Machkovech), I'd be delighted to have him write for us. I'll say it again: Jim is the best city columnist in Dallas. (This is one of my favorite pieces he's written, but there are many, many more.)

But if Jim is going to pull back the curtain, I'll help him pull it all the way back. I took Jim to lunch about a year ago, mostly because I'd never met him. I enjoyed the lunch. We talked a lot about the Morning News. I said if I ran the show over there, I'd hire him immediately. Jim said he'd never work there. And toward the end of the lunch, if I recall, I did say something along the lines of, "Well, if you ever get tired of working at the Observer, you've got a job at D." Words to that effect. Jim said he was happy at the Observer and would work there until "the bean counters wised up" and canned him. Again, something like that. I specifically remember "bean counters."

A couple times since, I think I've made reference to that conversation in e-mails. Here, for posterity's sake, is the exchange he's referring to, the one we had 24 hours prior to my Trinity post:

----------

on 9/12/06 2:41 PM, Tim Rogers at timr@dmagazine.com wrote:

> You = awesome
>
> http://frontburner.dmagazine.com/archives2/016829.html
>
> I'll continue to wait for you to get sick of working over there.
>
> Yours,
>
> =tim

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on 9/12/06 4:05 PM, Jim Schutze at [redacted] wrote:

> I'm so embarrassed. I've been asking people all afternoon if they thought
> D'Angelo was on the lowdown. Finally someone thought to ask me if I meant
> downlow. Shit. Then they laugh. It's fucking age discrimination, this stuff.

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on 9/12/06 4:12 PM, Tim Rogers at timr@dmagazine.com wrote:

> THAT made me giggle. "On the lowdown." Yeah, I think they made a movie about
> that.
>
> Never mind. I just gave up waiting for you.

----------

So that's just one more thing Jim is confused about. I did not finally concede the fact that he will not accept my repeated offers of employment. I was joking when I said I'd given up.

Jim, I'll never concede. The offer still stands. For you, I'll wait as long as it takes.

Tim Rogers · September 15, 2006 10:54 AM