Sure, but the—or, well, a—problem with this story is that it doesn’t raise any actual factual dispute that might challenge Holtzclaw’s conviction. It just treats the conviction as one among a competing set of essentially equal narratives, as if it’s just, like, the court’s opinion, man, and everybody’s entitled to…

“But don’t just be like “He’s such a nice guy (and here’s 800 words of nice things people said), and those women all had prior issues with the law, soooooooo...””

Now this makes more sense...

Because our culture consistently devalues the stories of survivors of sexual assault and gives a pass to their abusers, particularly when they are athletes or public figures.

If you want to write a story about how a convicted criminal is actually innocent, you need to provide actual evidence to support it. And you need to actually explain the evidence that led to the conviction. This piece basically said “Well his friends and family don’t think he did it and the victims were poor black…

“Sure, Robert Blake might have killed some people, but what about that killer hip-check, huh?”

Flexible displays can’t come too soon.

Not with that attitude

Perhaps covering Eastern Michigan football made him lose his mind. The team hasn’t had a winning season since 1995 and draws about 5,000 fans per home game.

If it was, the author completely missed the point of MoM and Serial. Both of them are about the criminal justice system as much as they are about the defendants. This story was just one big mess about Holtzclaw’s history, with occaisional offhand comments about the trial.

What a horribly written tweet.

I think the author thought, “Hey, I covered this guy for years and now he’s in the news! I’m going to go look at all my old reporting and talk to my sources who knew him and write something.” And then when he talked to Holtzclaw’s friends and family — and they were pretty sure he didn’t do it — he thought about Serial…

All you need to know about Holtzclaw is that when a cop in his department saw a pro-Holtzclaw article being shared on Facebook he lost his shit. He was fucking furious and had to refute it. (And almost accidentally jeopardized the case and said a couple of questionable things.)

My fucking monitor is a complete mess.

The author’s tweet about the article is still alive and well on his page:

This is absolutely disgusting and it is truly unbelievable that a site that writes something like the Mel Hall piece can hit publish on this.

If you want to write a long story that paints a complex portrait of a villain, it is adivisable to first find a villian with some degree of complexity. Former college football player turned cop who likes to rape women ain’t exactly Richard III.

is that the intent was to paint a complex portrait of a villain, which can be done if done well

So the guy who green lit and edited this piece, Glenn Stout, is the same guy who picks Best American Sportswriting every year? Great.

The downside to digital media is that, at the end of the day, you can’t wipe your ass with it.