Hearne: An Overdue Critique of The Pitch ‘Best Of” Issue

I’ve been putting this off all baseball season…

Baseball season for me being the month of October – or Okctober – as Dick’s Sporting Goods came within a World Series game of calling it. I’m referring of course to the annual Pitch “Best Of” folly.

Look, I get that the alt weekly is in sore need of cash at a time when the future of such publications are in serious doubt. Take the New York Times story in March that posed the question, “Are Alt Weeklies Over?”

Seriously, how lame and embarrassing it would be if Kansas City was stuck with just INK?

So at a time when the Pitch is lucky to choke out a third to half the pages and ads it did a just handful of year’s back, any port in the storm as the saying goes.

That said, there’s something inherently bogus and lame about kissing up to advertisers in such an arbitrary inauthentic way. Which unfortunately tends to take away to an extent from the more serious journalism that Pitch reporters like Steve Vockrodt work so hard to produce.

What’s wrong with the Pitch best of awards can be divided into three parts.

First and foremost, is the totally arbitrary nature of allowing anonymous Pitch writers to make their personal picks with no bylines and no rhyme or reason as to the methodology other than whimsy employed in making the choices.

Second are the undocumented and unquantified “reader’s choice” picks. The primary problem here being twofold: the votes are not monitored and/or counted by an independent body and the number of ballots cast for the winners are not revealed. Trust me I’ve been there and done this – if readers knew how few votes it took to attain many, if not most of the awards being handed out, it would make them a laughingstock.

And third, some of the categories are so queer it’s embarrassing the Pitch allows them into the issue. Then again, they need lots of filler to garnish a 100 page best of pullout section with nearly 60 pages of advertising. In a perfect world, the Pitch would have 60 percent advertising in every issue, unfortunately it seldom approaches even half. Which combined with its paltry page counts, is a recipe for disaster.

So yeah, if this is what it takes to keep the ship of alternative publishing state afloat, so be it.

But long as they’re gonna do it, why sell out – why not at least try and take the high road?

Because you know what, if some other biz was cashing in big time by putting out something this lame, wouldn’t the Pitch be the publication you’d expect to bust ’em?

Now on to the actual ‘Best Of’ awards…