Special Message from Kareem: A Bad, Bad Thing Turned into Something Good
Why I wrote the article “Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing," for which I recently received a Southern California Journalism Award.
Last week, I attended the Southern California Journalism Awards presented by the Los Angeles Press Club. I had been nominated for five awards for my Substack newsletter and won one award for Political Commentary (Local) for my article “Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing.” Naturally, I demanded a recount of my four losses—by hand, by AI, and by raccoon. The results remained rigged because I still lost. However, the AI did call me one of the greatest “basket weavers” of all time who made the “skycook” famous. I’ll take it.
When one wins an award, then golly-gosh-aw-shucks it, that can come across as an irritating humblebrag. I’m happy to have won the award—and the previous seven Columnist of the Year awards—not because it validates what I do, but because I get to hang out with a bunch of other cool writers for an evening. Journalists have always been heroes to me because of their passion and integrity. They are the unsung, under-appreciated, grime-streaked workers who shovel the coal of truth that keeps democracy humming.
Today, I will repost my winning article (“Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing”) with a new introduction about why, after initially deciding against commenting on the incident, I chose to write about it.
But first, I’m taking this opportunity to ask those of you who are free subscribers to become paid subscribers. I get many emails from some of you telling me you wish you could subscribe, but you just can’t afford it yet. To you, I say: I’m delighted you read the newsletter, and I’m thrilled to have you as part of our community. No worries, my friends.
To those who can afford to subscribe, let me put it in perspective. The newsletter is posted on average twice a week, 8-10 times a month, over 100 times a year. Yeah, that’s a lot of reading, research, and writing. I know because my small, overworked staff and I work seven days a week to produce them. We can only keep this newsletter alive as long as we have paid subscribers.
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Why should you? Because “Remember what the dormouse said: feed your head.” Which is exactly what we do with every newsletter: feed your head. (And if you got those lyrics reference, you need to immediately subscribe!) Subscribers get bonus material and the ability to comment on each article. That’s cool because I read every comment and often respond.