A ghost from blogstorms past

J. Wes Yoder was once at the center of a media grenzy. He was the unnamed stringer who did leg work for Rick Bragg at the New York Times.

At the time time i thought the whole mess was overblown and the product of excitable Andy Sullivan's personal history with Howell Raines.

What was odd at the time was that no one wanted to listen to what Mr. Yoder himself said. Sullivan accused Bragg of exploiting stringers; Yoder explained that he was not exploited. The "get Raines" crowd (many bloggers among them) took excitable Andy's word for it.

Not one of our finer moments.

This New York Observer piece is interesting now that we are three years past the event. (Scroll down, it's in the middle of the column). Wes Yoder is now a novelist, he still speaks highly of Rick Bragg. He even attended Bragg's wedding. So much for the Sullivan "rip-off and exploit thesis."

It is pretty clear in retrospect that that the Bragg scandal was smaller than it seemed.


See also this post.