Wait, so you bitch and moan about not being linked enough, or for journalists paraphrasing or shadowing your work, then praise a man who wins awards for doing precisely that?

To clarify: Tom Ricks posts about 1,000 words of text a week, 3/4 of which are single sentences linking to other people’s work. A significant percentage of his content is guest-written. And the very post announcing his award was written by someone else.

Now, if his one-sentence posting volume was large and indicated a huge dataset to draw from – say, the Instapundit model – I could see that being worth an award, especially if he was basically a content portal for the military. But he spends most of his text-based posts summarizing books he’s reading, or filling space with large photographs above a link to something else.

You write off these kinds of complaints as jealousy, but when your non-friends get ahead by doing exactly what Tom Ricks does, you shout to the high heavens. If we want to talk about informative, insightful, content-rich blogs at Foreign Policy, we have Mark Lynch and Dan Drezner. If we want to talk about informative, insightful, content-rich blogs by CNAS fellows, we have (again) Mark Lynch and Natural Security (Abu Muqawama could have been a contender if he’d kept posting). The Atlantic’s blogs say far more in a single week than Ricks does in an entire month.

This isn’t petty sniping. What, exactly, did Ricks do with his blog to warrant such a prestigious award? Did he break any news? Contribute some devastating analysis no one else did? Bring to light some scandal everyone else had ignored or missed? On what merit did he win?

That is what so many people are complaining about, Spencer. It’s not jealousy – I sure as hell don’t qualify for a “best of” statue – it’s confusion about what merits are being promoted by the award.

But whooooo caaaaaares. You are assuming awards are powered by justice. They’re arbitrary. Such is life.

Also, if it makes you feel any better, I suspect the NMA was rewarding his Wanat series if it was actually rewarding the “blogging” work, and the Wanat series was award-caliber journalism.

Paraphrasing an Army report and ripping off what other blogs already said four months previously is award-caliber journalism? I clearly don’t understand that universe if that’s what passes muster.

As for it being arbitrary… cool, I get it, but why congratulate him if it’s meaningless? Why mention it at all?

Because it’s an attaboy. Move on.

Fine, fine. But before you go praising Ricks’ 2009 blogging on Wanat, check out David Tate’s 2008 investigation into it, including interviews with local Nuristanis about what happened, in 2008. Then ponder who deserves empty useless awards you congratulate your friends for winning.

OK, we have a deal. But only if you consider for a second why you’re assuming Ricks is my friend, as opposed to someone whose work I respect and with whom I have had the occasional warm professional acquaintance. Might you be making an uninformed presumption?

Tom Ricks’ password seems to be messed up, so he asked me to leave this comment.

Who pissed in Josh Foust’s cereal bowl this morning?

Two quick points:

–the award is for the blog, not for one person. all those guest posts help the blog.

–the award isn’t for quantity

Cheers,
tom