We're kind of falling in love with the New York Observer's new-ish media reporter Tom Scocca. In today's interview with The Black Table, Scocca gives his thoughts on his gig covering the media and preaches to your choir:

I especially like it when an editor sends out a quote through a spokesperson. Oh, should I put that in quotation marks for you and pretend we talked? I'm sure a magazine editor would be really happy if one of his own fancy writers came in and said, "Well, chief, I couldn't score an actual interview with Sofia Coppola — she passed on this one — but her spokesperson e-mailed me some quotes." That wouldn't violate any journalistic standards.

Oh, shit. Did I just climb down off the turnip truck and start calling leading editors asswipes? What was that question about the self-servingness of the media beat, again?

Rock And A Hard Place [BlackTable.com]