The Session No. 86: Beer Journalism

The Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, is an opportunity once a month for beer bloggers from around the world to get together and write from their own unique perspective on a single topic. Each month, a different beer blogger hosts the Session, chooses a topic and creates a round-up listing all of the participants, along with a short pithy critique of each entry.

The April edition of The Session is hosted by Heather Vandenengel of Beer Hobo. She chose to write about the subject of beer journalism, which is a good topic for someone like me that spent five years earning his journalism degree in a cold Pennsylvania town. I didn't end up actually doing journalism, because I decided that I wasn't up to the task of taking a verbal beating with everything I wrote. My mind was made up before I started my fifth year of school and as I eventually started interning etc.

That hasn't meant that people who take in journalism for informative or entertainment purposes have not gotten under my skin. Most people out there are uninformed. I cant begin to tell you how many times I've seen people on Facebook, Twitter or via text message throwing a fit about what someone wrote in the paper that morning. "How dare they say that!" How dare they write that article!"

First of all, most people get upset at columns. What I was taught in my journalism classes was that columns and articles are quite different. Articles or stories should be straight news. Strict reporting. Columns are opinion pieces in which the columnist states their claim within the first three grafs and supports it with everything below. Not being able to tell the difference makes me want to bang my head off the wall.

I've also lost a lot of love for news. I love the speed at which news events are covered today and how fast information can be spread on an app like Twitter. Still, I've grown to feel that the news industry has a motive to not report anything at all. It's all for the ratings. The local weather services seem to be around to cause panic, but be sure to stay tuned in to them for further details. I almost got ran over leaving the gym a few months ago at 6 p.m. amid the panic for a snow/ice storm that wasn't due until 10 p.m. People are uninformed and listen to the news like numb zombies. Dig for a little information yourself and you would have known that we had plenty of time before the storm hit. A little more research (just a look at the temperature) would have told some people that it wasn't going to be cold enough for anything to freeze. What resulted was the easiest car clean-off of my life.

As for beer in the journalism industry, I go back to my rant on the difference between reporters and columnists. Around my area I don't notice any beer reporters in the local papers. I'd place them more in the columnist categories. Either that or in the critics category. Most reporting revolves around money and we all know most of the money is in the sectors of the beer industry that we don't like.

Some of these guys tend to do features on brewers and check out some eateries that have good brew selections. We definitely have a good one here in Pittsburgh by the name of Bob Batz who hails from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He heads up the PG Plate blog which has a slight bias towards food. Still, I think there's a reason for that and why we kind of frown upon beer in journalism.

There can't really be big journalism because I don't think there's that big of an audience yet. So, from my point of view it looks like the news outlets have only tended to mention beer when it comes to being a counterpart with food. After all, the uninformed public is easily swayed by food rather than the fine ales we have come to endear. Remember this the next time you read something from a newspaper. As journalists, are taught to write to our audience at approximately a fourth grade reading level.