Rants, anyone?

"When was the last time," Andrew Lyons asks, "you were really impressed with the moxy of a U.S. newspaper showed by putting itself on the line for an important issue?"

The answer, he implies, is "not lately." Although the United States enjoys tremendous freedoms, Lyons says, its major newspapers "seem to be failing us more and more," apparently too afraid of lawsuits, parent companies, advertisers and the bottom line to produce solid journalism.

Harsh? Maybe, but such complaints were fairly common a few years back on a popular but now-departed Web site called Newsmait.com. There, ink-stained and carpel-tunneled wretches posted comments on a bulletin board devoted to what journalists do best -- bitch and moan. Although visitors had some words of praise, mostly they aired their concerns about the declining state of journalism and, on a more personal level, what a crummy time they were having at their own papers.

Newsmait, the American Journalism Review wrote at the time, offers "a disturbing view of the newspaper industry. At papers coast to coast, the complaints are similar: low pay, long hours, clueless editors, burned-out reporters, shrinking budgets and a waning sense of purpose."

The posts were made anonymously, and the results were often hilarious and, every now and then, edifying. I suspect job-hunters found them useful if, of course, they were mindful that they were usually reading only one side of each story. Critics of the site complained that the posts sometimes got too personal and distorted the conditions at many papers. On the occasions when I checked in, I did spot a discussion or two that looked to be an in-house, personal dispute of little value to the rest of us.

Despite its popularity, Newsmait shut down in late 1998, and a subsequent effort to replace it -- http://newspage.virtualave.net -- is apparently now out of operation too.

Lyons, a copy editor at the Olympian newspaper in Olympia, Wash., is hoping to revive the spirit of Newsmait at a new site he's started up, The Poison Kitchen. You'll find it at http://www.poisonkitchen.com

PK offers a rant board where journalists can talk about what they like and don't like about their papers. Lyons intends to moderate the discussion but generally let it froth and foam. "I'll be going through the bulletin board on occasion and pulling submissions off if they aren't on subject or are mean without being poignant," Lyons says. "I have nothing against mean people, so long as they point the meanness at something."

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