Granted, Ms. Love has never been the traditional SUV-driving, cookie-baking kind of mom who posts incredibly detailed stuff about her baby’s poops.  But her recent slew of attention-getting Twitter insanity — and her 19-year-old daughter Frances Bean’s mortified response – suggests we are entering a new era of fail, one in which a parent’s awkward behavior isn’t of the adorable “What’s this button do?” variety. Instead, it may be more like “S#&% My Dad Said At Burning Man.”

Love, always a reliable train wreck and nowhere more in her wheelhouse of crazy than on Twitter, ramped it up last week when she accused Dave Grohl of hitting on her daughter in a lengthy series of tweets on her private account. She ranted freely about how angry she’d be “if frances slept with” him, going on about whether “the actual sex” was a rumor and adding that “dave tried to fuck me alot.” It was a display that Grohl’s publicist described as “Crazy Woman Says Insane Shit No One In Their Right Mind Would Believe.” And the young Miss Cobain, unsurprisingly, felt compelled to retort with her own variation on the classic, “Stop it, Mom, you’re embarrassing me.” Cobain issued a tart statement about “my biological mother,” saying that “her recent tirade has taken a gross turn” and adding, “Twitter should ban my mother.” She may be the most high-profile person to say it, but I’d wager Cobain is far from the only teenager who wishes Twitter could block her parents.

If you’ve never Tweeted your conviction that one of the Foo Fighters banged your teenager, congratulations, you’re not Courtney Love. But her tirade does represent an emerging dynamic that plays out in subtler ways across social media platforms. I’ve seen it with my own wincing eyes from parents who include their teenagers among their Facebook friends – and who post freely of their hangovers, their dating disasters, and their overall rock ‘n’ roll excesses. Those incriminating, spring break-like photos of the half-drunk lady from the party? Yeah, college kid, that’s YOUR MOM. It’s not that children are likely to be blithely unaware of their hipster parents’ lifestyles. But there’s a new blurring of the once easy-to-maintain tactful distance between parents and their young adult offspring, one complicated by the fact that many of us are cavorting on the road of excess a mere few steps ahead of our children.

Love has, in her typical fashion, attempted to kiss and make up with her daughter in the same format in which she originally speculated about her sex life – on Twitter. On Saturday, she posted, “Bean, sorry I believed the gossip. Mommy loves you.”

Mommy no doubt does. But the Gen-X parents who never quite settled down, who grapple with their own varying levels of maturity, now share the Internet with their teenagers. And the children whose shaky first steps and lost teeth have been documented all over Flickr and Twitter and Facebook are now turning into grown-ups themselves, with their own online lives. And while it’s our right as adults to party and to have sex and enjoy life, it’s also our job as parents to not be stupid. If your kid is old enough to read, your kid is old enough to be embarrassed by your Twitter stream. That’s why Love’s meltdown is a cautionary – if extreme – reminder that a typical Old Person Fail may no longer be an adorable “reply all” goof. Instead, it’s something that involves more ranting and thoughtlessness and way too much information. In other words, it looks an awful lot like a Young Person Fail.

On the second floor, a conference area, I’m taken aback by a strange little man in a garish baseball cap covered in team logos, his disbelief over a credentialing snafu bordering on delirium. “How am I supposed to do my job without a credential?” he hand-chops to the NCAA media relations people behind the counter. He’s got round wire-frame glasses, a gray unkempt beard and denim shorts reaching past his knees. He works for ESPN, but reminds me of a wacky political convention attendee. I’m here to embed in the stratums of journalistic society mashed together at the Final Four, to discover how the decline of print and rise of digital can be particularly divisive within the hyper-competitive, male-dominated arena of sports media.

When a female staffer determines his credential has already been picked up, he asks, “Who would pick up my credential? How could the NCAA let this happen?” It’s possible somebody from ESPN picked up credentials for his entire crew, they tell him. By the time he’s persuaded to step aside, everyone is in a foul mood. The head staffer tells me I’m not on the parking pass list in a tone like, “Sorry, Charlie.” He’ll have to check with his superior who’s at the Superdome. Won’t have an answer for me ‘til tomorrow. We stare at each other a moment, him in a pretty cool NCAA golf shirt by Nike.

Aboard the media bus to the Superdome, everybody’s male save a young woman who appears just out of college. Or perhaps she’s in college and writing for a student paper. People sit sideways in their seats and chit-chat. The prevailing vibe: Excitement for the basketball vortex ahead — practices, press conferences, games of colossal stakes. They’re beat reporters and columnists with laptop satchels, photographers with unwieldy bags of equipment, and TV cameramen, their equipment loaded in the cargo holds beneath the bus. “Now that U of L made it to the Final Four,” somebody says sardonically, “Matt Jones has to admit Louisville exists.”

Matt Jones is the chief media villain at the Final Four, the creator of a fan website/blog devoted to the University of Kentucky. The misleadingly named Kentuckysportsradio.com gets up to 150,000 unique visitors per day, and, as Jones likes to brag, it looks like it was produced on an Atari. It’s worth a visit for non-Kentucky fans for an advertisement link to Boone’s Butcher Shop, where you’ll find the following grammar: “Boone’s offers custom processing of your beef, hog, lamb, goat, buffalo, wild game and a numerous amount of other animals.”

A cherubic 34-year-old with a Duke law degree, Jones and his KSR writers popularized the slogan “Louisville doesn’t exist.” But Jones is a smart, media-savvy guy, and it’s his relentless criticism of nationally esteemed basketball writers like Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports and Pete Thamel of the New York Times that has earned him outcast status in arena workrooms.

Not that Jones is trying to be one of the guys. At the second and third rounds of the NCAA tournament at the YUM Center in Louisville, he tweeted out to his 46,000 followers that Forde was in the workroom “openly cheering” for teams playing on TV, a “yearly tradition.” This was in reference to the 2010 tournament, when Jones “called out” Forde for allegedly buying a round of drinks after Kentucky lost to West Virginia. Forde has been one of the more outspoken critics of Kentucky’s head coach, John Calipari, the only coach in history to have not one, but two Final Four appearances “vacated” by the NCAA for rules violations. On KSR, Jones and writers, under the guise of journalistic ombudsmen (but acting as what others might call fans with a press pass), regularly accuse Forde of having an agenda to attack Calipari. They claim he mentions Calipari’s checkered past whenever possible in his national articles, and that he yearns to “take down” Calipari through investigative reporting. Basically, they remind Kentucky’s fan base, known as the Big Blue Nation, to hate this writer. The most extreme segment of Kentucky’s fan base is notorious for sending hate mail and, in rare cases, issuing death threats. Forde lives in Louisville and has no geographical buffer. Here at the Final Four, they’ll share a workspace, representing two very different approaches to modern sports journalism.

As the bus navigates the narrow streets near the Superdome, we pass Tulane Medical School and somebody says he should’ve gone for a degree in medicine, not journalism. He’s referring to the decline of print, and people chuckle, grimly. Conversation then turns to Katrina and the displaced people who lived inside the Superdome under wretched conditions. The structure has since been repaired and repainted, a coppery hourglass shape on the river delta.

We’re dropped at a security entrance leading directly into the cement underworld, and everyone follows NCAA-hung placards around to the north end of the dome, where, on either side of the concourse, great reef-like workspaces begin to appear. A media workroom whose rows and rows of tables are equipped with power-strips; a media buffet/beverage area; an interview room with high stage for televised press conferences; a room with curtained booths for individual player interviews; a radio workroom; a photo workroom; a video/audio distribution room; an NCAA media relations office equipped like a Kinko’s; an NCAA operations office full of maps and computers and dudes with earphones who don’t want you in there; a CBS television studio; a CBS green room; a TNT green room; a CBS catering hall.

Going out to the brightly lit arena through a maw in the underworld, there’s the reassuring sound of bouncing balls. The University of Louisville has the court, the first practice of the day, followed by 30 minutes of interview time. The Final Four configuration of this cavernous space includes temporary stands bracketed over the permanent stands in the lower arena, so the seats extend down to the court less steeply, improving sightlines for basketball. The NCAA trucked the stands in, some 17,000 seats, and hung its octagonal scoreboard/video screen array relatively low over the court, to help give the place a college fieldhouse feel. All lit up, the array resembles the alien ship from “Close Encounters.” The maple basketball court, brand-new and buttressed 3 feet off the ground, has the look of a stage.

Media members are casually taking in practice, like ESPN color-man Jimmy Dykes, in an eye-popping zebra-print wind-pullover. Seating assignments, according to NCAA media coordinator David Worlock, depend on circulation and number of unique visitors per month; the bigger your outlet, the better your seat, though I’ll find out this rule doesn’t always apply. There are two rows of press on one side of the court, three on the other.

Eager to learn my assignment, I ask a man seated before a decrepit-looking laptop where I can find The List. He chuckles and tells me that in order to avoid getting complaints, the NCAA doesn’t release The List until tomorrow, about an hour before the first game. “It’s like a State Secret,” he says, removing his carpel tunnel brace.

This is Jerry Palm, who owns a degree in computer science and runs a website called collegeRPI.com. He’s the man who first brought the Rating Percentage Index to the public, in 1993. The RPI factors together a team’s strength of schedule (quality of opposing teams) and performance against those teams. It’s critical to the NCAA tournament because the selection committee uses it as a guide for team selection and seeding. If your favorite team didn’t make the tournament field, it might be because of this man’s area of expertise. Palm’s number-crunching website became so popular, he now crunches them for CBSsports.com. “It’s been a weird life,” he says.

“Why weird?” I ask, trying to discern if his laptop, though cruddy, is actually a supercomputer. His BlackBerry has a cracked screen.

“Who grows up wanting to be the RPI guy?” he laughs.

Palm ran collegeRPI.com for 18 years and found it impossible to get credentialed for the Final Four. In those early years, few websites existed — he was a vanguard user of the Internet, and a college basketball fan. “Now a good third of the people here are writing for some Internet version of a magazine or a newspaper or an Internet-only thing,” he tells me.

“Internet-only things” includes a range of places, from Yahoo Sports, widely considered the gold standard in sports journalism on the Web, to Jayhawkslant.com, part of the Rivals Network, which produces fan-friendly sites focused on individual teams and recruiting. (Rivals was purchased by Yahoo Sports in 2007; terms of the deal were never disclosed, but several sources reported sums up to around $100 million.)

Events like the Final Four are where the friction comes out – between print and online, between fan sites and sites that strive for more journalistic values, between writers who take shots at one another at a comfortable Twitter distance, then find themselves in the same workplace, on the same bus.

“A lot of the old-timers in print are frustrated by the lack of ethics shown by some places [on the Web],” Palm says.  “You follow a coaching search, for example. Guys are so worried about being first to the scoop (which coach is going to take which job), they don’t give a damn if they’re right anymore. I was following the rumors about [Purdue coach] Matt Painter last year, when he was connected to the Missouri opening. I’m a Purdue grad, so it was of great interest. Lots of websites were reporting it a done-deal, but he stayed at Purdue!

“I just think journalistic standards have become lower in sports. Some people don’t ever want to be wrong. My editors at CBSsports.com, they want to be first but they never want to be wrong. It’s the up-and-comers, the guys trying to make a name, who care more about being first than right.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

The NCAA allows fans to attend practices the day before the semifinals, and there’s Louisville Cardinal red filling the lower arena seats. Everything looks a little too bright and sharply defined down here, like hi-def in real life. The court’s blond wood is lacquered and reflective, and the players have fluorescent red practice uniforms and orange laces in black shoes. It dawns on me that the ambient sound of the court — bouncing balls and squeaking high-tops — is preternaturally loud, and issuing from above. Later I’ll get confirmation: The court is mic’d for the college fieldhouse feel.

Back in the media workroom, serving myself a barbecue sandwich from the buffet, I spot Gregg Doyel, a columnist for CBSsports.com. A sinewy white guy in his early 40s, he at one time sported a mohawk, but has since shaved his head bald. I approach him at his laptop cautiously; he’s reputed to have boxing skills and a short temper. His writing style is best described as “angry.”

“Conversationally angry,” he says cordially.  “I’m blunt. I try to write like I talk. But I write like I talk mad at you. I have some occasional lose-my-temper moments that my family and friends laugh about, but I’m not that person. I’m a nice guy in real life. I’m that versatile.”

So you cultivate a tough-guy image? I ask.

“To be on the Internet in sports and have readers really like you — my average reader is a college kid or a little older — you need a hipness to you.” Soul patch at the lower lip, he’s wearing bright green Nikes with jeans and a T-shirt. “I don’t know if I’m hip or not, but I can tell you I try to hide how old I am. I have two kids, 16 and 14, and if my readers find out I’ve got older kids, they might tune me out.”

I’m a holding a recorder and wonder what he’s thinking. Then it occurs to me that he’s talking like he writes — blunt statements, outrageous honesty. “I see a lot of sweater vests in here,” I say, surveying the room. People tend to congregate around the buffet, or the table with tournament  materials, which include highly produced media guides from each of the four teams.

“That’s because the people reading those old-timers are my age or older and aren’t gonna switch to the new-fangled Internet for their sports,” says Doyel. “The older newspaper guys are in their own little world.  You see them hanging out in cliques.” The power dynamic between the cliques, however, has changed.

“Four or five years ago, we wanted their cred, but I think we’ve reached a point where we’re taken just as seriously. In both print and Web we’re seeing more mistakes than ever only because we’re more aware of them than ever. It used to be if the paper in Topeka had the wrong coach going to Kansas State, only the people in Topeka knew about it. Now we can all talk about the mistake on Twitter.”

You call each other out?

“Let’s just say our profession is more inclined to have arguments and dust-ups because our egos are so big.  We have some name recognition.  It doesn’t compare to the athletes we cover, but when we get in a room like this one here, and there’s nobody bigger than us around — like LeBron James is not walking though the door to remind us how low we are — we fool ourselves into thinking we’re stars.  You see the egos walk through press rooms, and it’s like, ‘Wow, you really do think you’re Walter Payton.’ But you’re just a writer for the New York Daily News and we all know who I’m talking about. You’re just a columnist!”

What about you all loving sports? That doesn’t help you get along?

“There are a lot of friends in here. People are gonna go out for drinks and to restaurants. But what we all have in common, besides sports, is we all want readers, and because that other guy is really good, he’s a threat to me. It leads to a lot of stupid Twitter wars. I’ve had my share and I’m not having any more.  What happens is, a guy says something bad about me and baits me into a Twitter war, and it’s not even real. He just wants to steal my followers.”

Just then, we’re interrupted by Matt Jones. He’s wearing an untucked button-down, and around his neck is a media credential, through his TV work for CN2, a local cable subsidiary of CBS. He greets Doyel by saying, “I didn’t even know you were comin’!”

It’s a press room joke, I think, one referencing Bill Simmons, who’s such a famous columnist for ESPN, the company allows him to stay home and watch sports in his living room. Or so the joke goes. “Why would I not be here?” asks Doyel. “I’m the man!”

For the first time in the workroom, I feel self-conscious about the company I’m keeping.  If Jones and Doyel are friends, is Doyel media villain No. 2? I like Doyel, and am keeping an open mind about Jones, but I want others to talk to me, like Pat Forde.

After Jones departs, I ask: How much can you criticize teams and coaches and not alienate your readers?  The fan sites are more popular than ever these days.

“I try not to worry about that, but it’s not easy. Fans want to be told what they believe is true. Sports and politics are the exact same, and they’re both depressing. The attitude is, Mitt Romney’s great because all Republicans are great and don’t tell me otherwise. If a Democrat already thinks Obama’s health plan is overreaching, then he or she can accept reading that. But if you take your criticism one step further, then a Democrat won’t listen because you’re obviously a Republican.”

Did it ever occur to you that when your readers are reading you, they should probably be doing something else? Like working?

“Never occurred to me,” he says, with a chuckle, “but I see what you mean. I’m writing for a guy who oughta be in a sales meeting. Which means he’s reading quickly and not paying close attention. Which explains why my hate mail is so stupid.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Louisville coach Rick Pitino is conducting a presser in the adjoining room, and the entire thing is being transcribed in real-time by a service called ASAP Sports. Back out on the court, the Kentucky team is hoisting three-pointers in a happy-go-lucky way — they’re the prohibitive favorite. I sidle up to Seth Davis, a CBS analyst and Sports Illustrated writer, greeting a group of school kids here to watch practice.  The son of Lanny Davis, often seen as a Fox News contributor and a former Bill Clinton advisor, he’s got swarthy good looks, a sharp gray suit with a lavender pocket square. He cheerfully agrees to a walk ‘n’ talk in the concourse.

“At the end of the day, this is fun,” he tells me. “You’re on the road, you’re at the Final Four. We cover scandals, there’s cheating, you want to be a serious journalist. But you’re not embedded with Marines in Afghanistan. You’re hanging out with sports people in different cities. Every year I get to see people like Mark Blaudschun [an old-timer for the Boston Globe]. But I’m kinda looking forward to Tuesday, when this is all over. I’m pretty fried already. Being in New Orleans doesn’t help.”

We’re discussing his journalism background — Davis started in print — when two teenage girls come around the corner. “Hey gorgeous, times two,” he intones flirtatiously, and the girls literally simper.  I assume they’re CBS interns, or perhaps daughters of a coach; they’re so young, it’s innocuous and charming. He returns to talking about the competitive nature of sports journalists.

“Guys want to break things first, and it’s anything. Is LeBron gonna play for Miami? In the blogosphere, they were handicapping who in the media would get that story first. I think it’s pretty juvenile. I’m lucky at SI. We don’t sell ourselves that way. We’re more about the writing and reporting. But I admire guys who do it [get the scoop], guys like Andy Katz [ESPN], Gary Parrish and Jeff Goodman [both of CBSsports.com. They take a lot of competitive pride in it.

“I was having a conversation about this with Chuck Todd [chief White House correspondent and political director of NBC News]. My sense is there’s more competition in sports to be first. Everybody’s trying to get noticed. One way to do that is get the scoop, another is being as loud and obnoxious and mean as you can. How incendiary can you be?”

“Just as in politics,” I say, wondering if he counts Doyel as incendiary.

“It’s a very true parallel.  You gotta go to the polarized extreme. I think people like to be provoked.  There’s a lot of trash-talking in sports, but in politics, I think there’s genuine demonizing. Hey there, hot lady …”

It’s CBS courtside reporter Lesley Visser, whose face has fewer wrinkles than her sideline reporters 30 years her junior. “Can I borrow him for a second?” she asks, giggly to see Davis.

Visser’s been a pioneer for women in sports journalism, the first female NFL analyst on TV, and the only sportscaster in history, male or female, to have worked on broadcast crews for all of the following: the Final Four, NBA Finals, World Series, Triple Crown, Olympics, Super Bowl, World Figure Skating Championships and U.S. Open. Yet as she and Davis chat, she keeps grabbing his arm and touching her hair, like a teenage girl.

“Tomorrow’s a long day,” Davis tells me before being whisked away in a golf cart, young and forever male. “Production meeting, rehearsal, the pre-game show, the games, the post-game show.  And I’m doing some corporate work for Subway. A little lettuce on the side,” he says, winking.

- – - – - – - – - -

Saturday morning at the Marriott brings another parking pass fiasco — the NCAA staffers are at a meeting until 11 a.m., and I’ve arrived at 9 a.m. to see if I’ve been added to the list. Other journalists need to pick up credentials. People are pissed. But it’s easy to calm down in the media hospitality room, known as “Club Hospi.” Popping a couple bite-size pain au chocolats from a nice selection of pastries, I overhear two guys saying they put on sport coats just to make sure they gained admittance to the room — they haven’t gotten their credentials yet. Then I meet Robert Allen, a heavyset man in jean shorts with tool pockets, and a utility vest. He’s disappointed by the buffet, because it lacks breakfast staples like eggs and bacon. Says he runs a satellite truck parked over at the dome. The “morning shot” got canceled, and he won’t work again until Sunday morning. Plans to watch TV in his room all day.

When I arrive at the Superdome, I think I’m getting an early start on interviews despite the parking-pass delay — except the workroom is completely empty.  The first game isn’t until 5 p.m., but I figured people would have work to do beforehand.

Maybe everyone’s hung over.  By 1:30, there are seven people.  On the tables, stacks of media guides have been left as place savers, with notes like, “New York Post, don’t even think about it.”

Later, I walk the circumference of the concourse, timing it on my watch (6:43 at a brisk pace). I pass a SWAT team with a bomb-sniffing dog. TV technicians setting up monitor/camera hutches in surprising places, like right outside the locker-room doors. Caterers carting around food. Open storage areas full of derelict machinery, old metal signs, ladders. Nooks and crannies where crime may have taken place in the days following Katrina.

Around 3 p.m., people begin to filter in and I approach Mark Blaudschun from the Boston Globe, the old-timer Seth Davis mentioned. His dark suit and Massachusetts accent give him the grizzled air of an old-school sports writer. In his 25th year at the paper, this is his 27th Final Four overall.

“The print media at the Final Four has shrunk considerably every year,” he says. “It’s become much more digital and TV oriented. When I first started, the Final Four area for print media was twice this size.  The NCAA says credential requests for print are way down.

“There’s a generational transition going on here. You have the new wave who are tweeting and blogging all the time. They’ll have the little camera going or they’ll talk into their phone. And then you have the old guys who have been around for 25 years, and we’re doing some of the new stuff, basically because we have to. But we still write stories.”

You tweet and blog?

“Yeah, but they don’t ask me to do video streaming.” A satisfied chuckle. “They’re like, OK we’ll leave him alone with that. I’m old-fashioned. The paper is more important than all that other stuff.”

Do print guys get along with Web writers?

“It’s almost like a caste. When you look around, the young guys are sitting together according to print and Internet. Or by geographical areas, like all the New York guys will sit together. It’s cliquey. It’s just natural.

“We’re dinosaurs,” he says of his print colleagues. “Even at the Globe. Boston.com is like watching the tide come in. We’re expected to do more and more instantaneous reporting with less accountability, which bothers me. Because in this age, you can blog something and if it’s wrong it disappears in an hour. In the old days, it was there forever. The standards are different. People are more interested in getting there first, and if they’re wrong, they go, ‘Oh well’ and fix it.

“Listen, I could start a rumor in this room and an hour later it’d be all over the country. ‘Sources close to the source say such and such.’ That’s mind-boggling to me.

“The Globe used to be a destination point.  Now we’re losing guys to ESPN and Yahoo for the job security.”

A little after 3 p.m., the media starts to arrive en masse. Most go directly to the buffet for baked ziti.  I approach one of the few female writers I’ve seen in the workroom, Marlen Garcia, from USA Today.  In dark slacks and a blouse, she has a warm smile, and sits near the buffet where people can easily stop by and say hello. She’s popular.

“So I’m sure you get asked this a lot,” I begin, “but what’s it like working in a male-dominated sports environment? Do you feel inundated by testosterone?”

She chuckles. “Among the coaches, sure. The athletes I find are pretty mellow. There are a lot of women in this business who came before me and laid the groundwork, and I’ll forever be grateful. The old-timers in this business, the men — they’re fabulous. They didn’t treat me any differently when I was a woman at 25 and naive, and now that I’m, uh hum, closer to 39, they still don’t treat me differently. They’re great guys with a lot of insight to pass on.”

And the younger guys?

“I have to say, they can be a little arrogant. I’ll find myself listening to a 20-something dot-commer with a great beat like Notre Dame football, and he’s complaining about how hard his life is. And you wanna say, ‘Look, punk, I started out covering high school sports, and helped put together a sports section for the Chicago Tribune, and would’ve killed for the Notre Dame beat.’

“Some dot.coms, I’ve noticed, get better seats than I do at events. I’ve not seen a fan site get a better seat.  But if I did, we’d have to box.”

What about journalistic credibility. Does print have more?

“It’s a crazy time,” she says. “Everybody’s trying to figure out how to make money. USA Today recently brought on a new president of USA Today Sports, which has been renamed Sports Media Group. We’re under new management completely. We have a new managing editor. Everything is geared more towards online, and we all have to reapply for our jobs. I’ve been at USA Today six years.”

Do you think management wants to look at everybody’s resumes and work history in terms of how suitable they are for online content?

“I think you hit it on the head. I like to write features. I went to Anthony Davis’ high school [a star Kentucky player] and wrote a really in-depth piece about his background. I’m going to find out if there’s a place for that under our new management. ESPN.com has a female reporter, Dana O’Neil, who does long-form human interest stories, so I’m thinking there’s an audience.

“I think I’ve been in a bit of denial about the print industry dying. I studied print journalism in college. Print! I came up at the Chicago Tribune! I said to my husband, ‘I feel like I’m grieving, going through the different stages.’ Denial, then bargaining — can I sell them on these long stories? I like to tell stories, but are they going to be of value? Then anger, oh the anger. Anger has been a big one, especially over the last couple weeks. So much anger. But I think I’m heading closer to acceptance.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Out in the concourse, technicians rush around with cables, pep bands head out to the floor with polished instruments, equipment mangers from UK and U of L race in and out of locker rooms. A cameraman is filming behind-the-scenes, floodlighting the cement hallway.  I see former Georgetown coach John Thompson, now a radio analyst for CBS, and former UNLV player Greg Anthony, a TV analyst.  Ushers are showing VIP guests the way out to the floor.

Before the tipoff, I sit down with Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports. Pre-game, it turns out, is a journalist’s least busy time. In his late 40s or early 50s, he has an athlete’s build and thick salt-and-pepper hair gelled into a kind of sculpted-over part.

“My schedule today is moderately complicated,” he says. “Greg Anthony and I did two videos for Yahoo on the court, and I’ll be writing the overview of both games tonight, spinning forward to the championship game.  I’ll be taking notes during both games, and tweeting like a madman. Then I’ll do three more videos on the court after the game, for use tomorrow and Monday.”

When will you write? I ask facetiously.

He chuckles. “That’s actually one reason I was happy to move to Yahoo [from ESPN]. I actually have less video ‘intrusion’ than at ESPN. Today’s an exception to that.”

Are there stories you couldn’t write at ESPN that you can write at Yahoo?

“There’s a greater embrace of investigative reporting at Yahoo. Yahoo is so unencumbered by ‘other stuff you gotta do,’ they say fine, just drop everything for two weeks and go do this [chase your story]. You don’t see that very much anymore.”

At ESPN, did you feel there were some conflicts of interest, journalistically speaking?

“There are inherent complications there when your company is paying hundreds of millions of dollars in broadcasting rights fees and you’re trying to cover those same entities.”

But now major websites like Yahoo and ESPN.com are considered traditional media.

“Yeah, but if you look at the seating chart for tonight, Yahoo’s on the third row, despite having the largest readership of anybody here.” He laughs. ” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is on the front row, and nothing against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, it’s a very fine paper, but our circulation is probably 9 million times what theirs is!”

I’m in front of you too, I tell Forde. I guess that’s why they don’t release The List until right before the game.

“Quite honestly, it’s prestige and ego. ‘Well, I work at this place, so I should be seated better than this and I’m not. There’s a lot of testosterone in this room, for better or worse, because it’s a mostly male-driven enterprise here.”

Forde declined to talk about Jones, but would say there were many more layers of ‘society’ in the media workroom than when he first started covering Final Fours in 1991.

“Absolutely. Now you have guys with flip-cams and it’s like, ‘What happened to you, when did you become a videographer?’ Another big change is the influx of the “fan journalist.’  There are a lot of ‘fan boys’ in this room who didn’t used to be here. But they get credentials now. Some of them aren’t what those of us in traditional media would consider legitimate, but other people do.

“To me, they’re the same as politically biased radio playing to their base. A lot of fans, that’s all they want. Tell me how great my team is all the time, and how bad our rivals are. And anybody who says anything bad about my team is biased, or has an agenda. It’s funny, the attitude of Kentucky fans toward John Calipari is very different now from when he was at Memphis. And the attitude of Louisville fans toward Rick Pitino is very different from when he was at Kentucky.”

Around 4:40 p.m., the workroom starts emptying out. Ushers have us pour our drinks into cups that say Powerade, an NCAA sponsor. It feels like “showtime,” though we have absolutely nothing to do with the production. A camera boom swings overhead, and it’s an absolute cataclysm of sound, drums thundering, student sections shouting at the players as they go through warmups, cheerleaders spelling out team names. Seth Davis has taken up his position on the CBS broadcasting altar amid a palisade of fans in end-zone seating. My seat, even with one of the basketball stanchions, is behind the Kentucky bench.  Sitting in the stands directly behind me is Jay-Z, and just down from him, Ashley Judd. Jerry Palm is taking paparazzi pics with his phone — he got the cracked screen repaired today. Sitting to my left, Time.  To my right, the Kansas City Star.

The game is close, filled with dramatic moments, and sitting press-row is an exercise in restraint. It goes without saying it would be unprofessional to cheer, but I get the feeling I’m supposed to remain impassive even when a player does something athletically amazing. As if I’ve seen it all before. Complicating matters further, should the bench players stand up to cheer, we’re to remain seated, missing the run of play.

But we do have some perks, like personal monitors updating statistics, and Ethernet cables at each seat. The Time guy is checking his Facebook page, and the Kansas City Star looks to be liveblogging and tweeting. The guy on other side of the Time guy has already started writing an article. As best I can tell, he wrote a lead with blank spaces for team names.

During timeouts, media etiquette involves sitting stone-faced as cheerleaders do amazing athletic feats a few feet in front of you. Dance teamers do their thing too, their bodies rock-hard. It’s best to not look, and most of us try not to. During one timeout, I stand up to stretch my legs, and Jerry Palm comes over and says, “You’re not gonna believe this … I’m charging Jay-Z’s phone!” Apparently Jay-Z spotted a compatible charger on press-row, and requested juice.

At halftime, we head backstage to the workroom. People discuss the game, call home to their families, queue up for beverages. Some eat leftover ziti. I overhear two Sports Illustrated interns saying they saw a guy on press-row reading the National Geographic website.

Just before the second half begins, I’m approached by a guy in overflow seating (folding chairs behind press row, reserved for local TV, radio and interns). “Who’s that woman you were interviewing in the media room?” he asks. “She’s from USA Today, right?”

The pearly smile, the black three-button suit, the gregariousness: more sales rep than media. He wants to know Marlen Garcia’s name, and I give it to him, suspicious. His name is Clifford Early, and he works in radio. I’ll learn later that he’s one of the proprietors of a radio start-up that’s just barely getting off the ground.

Everybody assembles outside the victorious Kentucky locker room, waiting for the 10-minute cool-down period to expire, at which point, the doors will open and we’ll all flood inside, and a female reporter will get unintentionally shoved into a red-rope stanchion. The rush? Player interviews at their lockers, second-string guys and walk-ons who aren’t asked to the press room.

At the presser, Kentucky players are jazzed to advance to the championship game Monday night. They joke onstage, whispering funny asides behind cupped hands, and sometimes, when a media member asks a question, a player is caught off guard because he wasn’t paying attention. Hard to think them disrespectful, one game away from a championship, and they’re college kids, after all, three freshmen and two sophomores with a lone senior. It’s just weird, really weird, to see so many intelligent adults dependent on six distracted teenagers to do their job.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Much of the media, both print and Web, will remain at the Superdome until late — the workroom is open ‘til around 4 a.m. At the final buzzer of the Kansas vs. Ohio State game, a Jayhawk victory, fans hurl down seat cushions, hundreds of Final Four-embossed cushions meant to be taken home as souvenirs. It’s a beautiful sight, these raining cushions, and as I’m packing up my laptop, I notice Clifford Early collecting as many off the floor as he can find. He asks if I want one, and I accept, glancing over both shoulders, because maybe it’s poor form to take home fan-jettisoned freebies?

About a half-hour later, in the Superdome parking garage, I run into Clifford again. He’s with a buddy, also dressed in a suit, and they’ve got a clear plastic trash bag full of the cushions. This bag is industrial-size, like the kind used to hold helium balloons, probably procured from the Superdome janitorial staff. A conservative guess would be 40 to 50 cushions. “You want another one?” asks Clifford. “We got plenty.”

“Are those gonna end up on eBay?” I ask, grinning.

“No, no,” says his buddy. He’s balding, heavyset, sweating in the balmy night air. “For friends and family members.” He gives me his card, which says “Dan the Man Leach” from Sports Edge Radio. Clifford’s info is on the flipside. As far as I can tell, they’re at the Final Four to network.

No games on Sunday, but Kansas and Kentucky come to the Superdome to practice and do interviews.  The latter include individual player “breakout” pressers inside curtained areas the size of a small room, with an NCAA moderator assigned to each, and TV cameras in the rear. It feels like being inside a photo booth for 30-40 people. It’s kosher to walk between booths, duck in and duck out. When I see Gregg Doyel, he’s concerned about something he might have said in our interview.

Kansas coach Bill Self and Kentucky’s Calipari get interviewed in the press room at length. Calipari is strangely upbeat and prickly at the same time. When a reporter trips on his words, perhaps out of nervousness, and then trips again, the coach says, “Come on, you’re stutterin’!” It’s meant as a joke, but considering one of his best players, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, has a true stuttering issue, it seems particularly insensitive. Of course coaches razz media all the time, none worse than former Indiana coach Bob Knight, widely considered a bully. On the whole, it’s a far more egotistical, juvenile sort of man, the multimillionaire coach, and the media must hang on his every word. Coaches who comport themselves with basic human decency are hailed “class acts.”

Muffalettas and jambalaya for lunch, our best yet.  After checking with his editor at the New York Times, and perhaps doing a background check on me, Pete Thamel has agreed to chat — but declines to talk about fan sites specifically. (“It doesn’t do me any good,” he says.) He’s 34 with a dark nefarious brow, or maybe it’s an inquisitive sleuth’s brow.

“The Times fancies itself a watchdog,” he says.  “There’s a lot of cheerleading media in college sports, and we certainly don’t partake in that.”

Do you have more freedom at the Times than you did at ESPN the Magazine (his previous employer)?

“There’s more of an appetite to dig in. ESPN the Magazine wasn’t banging down the doors to investigate. It’s a good magazine but also has a lot of puff pieces and glorification of athletes. They try to be hip and edgy, and we don’t try to be hip and edgy, obviously.”

Like they do with Forde, the KSR site accuses Thamel of having an anti-Calipari agenda. When Thamel investigated Kentucky recruit Enes Kanter for amateurism issues — the NCAA ultimately deemed him ineligible to play college ball — Jones thought his article showed questionable reporting practices. Things took a mean edge. When the Times ran a minor correction over a misattributed quote, KSR claimed a minor victory, and dubbed him “Thamel Toe.” An underground online T-shirt store produced “Neuter Thamel” shirts and “Investigate Pete Thamel’s report card” shirts, in reference to Thamel’s investigation into the fishy transcript of Kentucky player Eric Bledsoe.

A few tables away from Thamel, I sit down with Jones.  I tell him what I’m writing, and how surprised I am at the candor I’ve encountered.

He jokes, “If there’s one thing the media likes to talk about more than sports, it’s themselves.”

How does it feel? You’re pretty much the villain here.

“It’s like the JFK quote: ‘Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.’ A lot of them don’t even like that I’m here. I’m an outsider because I didn’t go to journalism school. They like to think of themselves as unbiased reporters, but I think that’s bogus. Everyone has biases.

“It’s the lawyer in me.  I like to face my critics.” He nods in the direction of Thamel. “There’s Pete Thamel from the New York Times. I’d like to talk to him, but he won’t talk to me. He acts like he doesn’t know who I am, but that’s a lie.”

During our interview, Jones and I will discuss his relationship with Forde, how things went so terribly wrong. As he talks, his face reddens from what I take to be embarrassment. He says he wants to patch things up with Forde, and seems to understand that stopping his “gotcha” tweets might be a good place to start. At the same time, he’s not going to stop being an outspoken lightning rod.

“These guys are failed athletes. Who do they hate most? The retired pro-athletes on TV getting paid millions of dollars [as commentators].”

Assuming you’re not getting paid millions, what do they hate about you?

“That I admit my bias. But I criticize Calipari all the time. I’m not a guy who sees things in black and white. Most of them have been doing this so long they’re jaded and not fans anymore. I’ve had a few guys say I’m my own boss [acknowledging his freedom] and that I don’t have to adhere to anyone else’s [journalistic] standards.

“The one thing I have to be careful about is when I report bad news. There was a quarterback who got arrested for marijuana possession, and because I was a lawyer at the time, I heard about it before anyone else. I had it verified to 98 percent, enough to post on the site, but on the 2 percent chance I was wrong, there was no incentive to rush to bad news.”

How does KSR do financially? I ask.

“In two years time we expect to be doing pretty well.” He names numbers he doesn’t want published, and I’m taken aback. The blog currently has two other paid employees, one fulltime, and Jones expects to hire more. “It’ll take some corporate sponsorships. And we need Calipari to stay at Kentucky. It helps when the team is good.”

Is the media ever going to accept you?

“Professors [at Kentucky universities and colleges] will invite me to speak to their classes. I’ve spoken to classes in leadership, sports marketing, business … but never journalism.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Championship Monday unfolds similar to semifinals Saturday, with media arriving at the Superdome later in the day. By 6:45 p.m., TV people are bustling around the concourse for the 8:20 tipoff, and everyone in the workroom looks a little extra primped for the final game of the season. Waiting to take the floor, I meet blogger Adam Zagoria from New York, who has longish flyway hair and a sport jacket of designer drape over an untucked button-down. Zag’s Blog is known ‘round the workroom for its college basketball recruiting scoops and coverage of the Knicks. And Dan Wolken, a recent print media evacuee who bypassed traditional websites for the Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s tablet newspaper venture.

As I head onto press row, I pass Clifford Early and Dan the Man Leach sitting overflow.  They’re taking phone pictures, and I say, “You guys look like you’re having a ball!”

“We are!”

Kentucky beats Kansas in a game never much in doubt, a fait accompli. Toward the end, an NCAA staffer comes around with an instruction sheet. We’re advised confetti will drop from the ceiling when the final buzzer sounds (in reality it will explode out of the Close Encounters video array, with several startling concussive bangs), and if we’re not working, we might want to close our laptops to protect our keyboards from the confetti. Among the rules for the trophy presentation and net cutting, interviews are to pause during the playing of the “One Shining Moment” video montage on the arena screens.

Later, out in the concourse, I spot Matt Jones talking on his cellphone, doing a post-game radio call-in show for fans back in Kentucky. He gives me a winning smile and a thumbs up, unabashedly ecstatic about Kentucky’s eighth national championship.

Then it’s back to the Marriott for an NCAA media dinner, scheduled to run until 3 a.m. Everyone is invited — print, mainstream Web, fan sites, blogs, tablet apps.  It’s a celebration, at segregated tables, of a job well done.

Commenters on Belkin’s essay slammed Lynn-Weiss and Coburn for pimping out their kids. Coburn didn’t see things quite that way — she said she wrote her original post with her daughter’s blessing — and in her HuffPo Parents post, she described what it was like to be on the receiving end of over-the-top vicious comments made on the basis of reading one essay. A few commenters on her Salon piece, she said, even accused her of having borderline personality disorder.

Which is a pretty big insult because borderline personality disorder looks something like this.

That rang a sinister bell: When my piece on the prospect of losing custody of my son ran on Salon last year, one commenter said I had histrionic personality disorder – HPD being the slightly less deranged fraternal twin sister of BPD.

It looks something like this.

So I scanned the comment sections on both Coburn’s Salon piece and my Salon piece and discovered that the commenter who had accused her of being borderline and me of of being histrionic was … THE VERY SAME TROLL!!!

Now I was really intrigued. Since Salon compiles pages of each registered commenter’s comments, I was able to do some easy reconnaissance work on the commenter I will refer to as Tommy DiTrolla. In 42 pages of comments on hundreds of Salon essays dating back to 2005, Tommy accused roughly half the writers of having a personality disorder.

According to Tommy, Salon staff writer Mary Elizabeth Williams has narcissistic personality disorder.

Which looks something like this.

Why? Because Williams writes about her cancer, in Tommy’s esteemed opinion, solely to seek sympathy. He accused her of having histrionic personality disorder as well, which means I’m in excellent company.

Tommy had some choice labels for other writers.

Salon advice columnist Cary Tennis was “codependent.”

Codependent looks something like this.

Salon editor-at-large Joan Walsh was an “ass.”

I think we all know what an ass looks like.

And a bunch of lesser-known writers like me were certifiable narcissists, borderlines or histrionics.

Tommy knew this, he said, from years spent “reading psych papers, personal observations and theorizing.”

But what is his “theorizing” really culled from? According to psychologists who study the behaviors of Internet trolls, much of the latter’s assertions about bloggers are actually projections of their own issues and life experiences.

And this indeed proved to be the case with Tommy. After browsing his copious comments, in which he revealed bits of his own personal history, I discovered that his obsession with diagnosing bloggers stemmed from being mired in the after-effects of a torturous divorce, during which he apparently lost custody of his two sons.

Whether through the slings and arrows of a truly narcissistic ex, or through frailties all his own, Tommy apparently was reduced to riding a bike for transportation and living in a trailer. Although he referred to his job as a professor of engineering, he clearly had a lot of time to kill riffing on the psyches of bloggers.

With all that energy spent reading, and researching personality disorders, it’s odd, and sad, that he hasn’t converted his strong opinions – some of which were actually lucid and based on solid research – into publishing pieces of his own.

There are a lot of Tommy DiTrollas lurking on the Internet these days, and Salon in particular is like a siren call for the angriest, stalkiest trolls around. For anyone who has been the target of rabid troll critiques, it feels like the cyber equivalent of being cornered by a bunch of middle-school Mean Girls out for a quick lynching.

While it’s true that confessional bloggers — of which I am one – should be prepared for some harsh words when they air their dirty linens in front of millions, no one should have to endure being publicly eviscerated. Especially on the basis of a single blog post.

On the other hand, smackdowns from trolls are becoming so commonplace that being labeled with a personality disorder is starting to feel like a compliment. Evidence of my writing talent, even!

But what do you expect from a borderline, histrionic narcissist?

I had so many other questions to ask: What did he do for a living? Did he have other children? Was he married? Did he drink coffee? Was he happy? Were there pictures of me — a smiling, chubby baby — on the walls of his home or was it easier for him to forget I ever existed?

But I could not ask him any of this, because we had not actually met in person. At the age of 27, I saw my father for the first time when I found him on Facebook.

Up until a few months ago, I didn’t even know what he looked like. Years earlier, I had scavenged my mom’s old photo albums for evidence but didn’t find much — just his name, pictures of his parents and another child from a previous relationship. (Apparently, he had chosen to remain in my older half-brother’s life.) I also found our one remaining picture together. I’m an infant, my mouth wide open in anticipation of the spoonful of food his hand is preparing to deliver. It’s just his hand, though, nothing else. For nearly three decades, that dark, strong hand was the only image I had.

There wasn’t much else to be found. My mom met him in college and they’d married young. Since I was never told much about him, I made up my own romantically tragic stories: They married early because I was on the way; their interracial relationship threw my mom’s Archie Bunker-like dad into a tailspin, one that ended their relationship when I was just a year old. The only thing I ever knew for sure, though, was something my maternal grandmother told me when I was 10 years old. “He walked away from both of you,” she said. “When he and your mom got divorced, he told her he never wanted anything to do with her or you ever again.”

Then, earlier this year, I got a Facebook friend request from a young man with the same last name as me. Without thinking much about it, I paged through his profile trying to place how I knew him. Just before I clicked “Not Now” on his request, I was struck by who he might be. I froze in place: He had my father’s last name. This was a brother, a cousin, someone from my dad’s side of the family. I confirmed our friendship, and then I devoured every inch of his profile. I searched for faces that looked like mine, searched for hands that looked like my father’s. But this young man kept his profile sparse. So I typed my father’s name in the search bar. He came up immediately. Everybody’s parents are on Facebook these days.

I wondered if he could see me, if he had seen me already. Perhaps the cousin had told him about me. I wondered what I would look like to him. Did I resemble his son? Would he see familiar parts of himself, maybe something I had missed? As I looked closer, I could see that we did have the same eyes and the same full, dark lips. I wanted him to think I was beautiful. But I hoped that wouldn’t be the only reason he might want to be in my life. I wanted him to think I had turned out well. I had often wondered if he regretted leaving behind the baby that turned into this young woman.

I had the urge to change all my privacy settings, enabling anyone online to view my photos. I wanted to show him every part of me that he had missed. I wanted him to notice that I’d been promoted recently, that I had gone to a good school, that I had jumped out of a plane in New Zealand recently. I knew he’d see that I was engaged, and I hoped he’d be curious about the young man who would be marrying his daughter, taking the protective role he had long ago relinquished. I wanted him to see that, unlike and in spite of him, I had maintained healthy relationships with the important people in my life, that I was happy and adventurous. I hoped he’d feel pangs of regret for not having been there, for having nothing to do with the way I turned out. I had made it nearly 27 years believing I didn’t care whether or not I knew my father, and now, here we both were, on Facebook together, and all I could think about was how I might get him to like me.

I went back and forth in the days that followed. Some days I would make my profile public, allowing everyone to read my wittiest thoughts, peruse my best pictures, see all of my friends. On other days, I felt he didn’t deserve this. For years he had made no effort to find me. (It would not have been hard. I lived in the house where my mother grew up, and I had his last name.) Why should I make it so easy for him now?

And then, there is the worry that his friend request might never come — that he simply does not want to know me. If the past is any indication, I certainly can’t count on him to reach out. I’m not sure I want him to reach out this way anyway. Facebook — this artificial, flat universe of human relationships — is not the place where I want to start anew.

The complicated tangle of feelings I harbor for my dad moves far beyond what can be contained in a casually cheery Facebook message or a 160-character wall post. I am still angry, curious, hurt, anxious – and I’m sure I can’t properly convey all of that, period, ever, far less in a two-dimensional social media network where everyone is watching. But a Facebook friendship is the lowest-stakes form of friendship, easy as a click of a mouse. And it stings that he can’t even manage that. He has been given yet another opportunity to be a part of my life — I am right there in front of him — and he’s rejected me all over again.

I have always been close with my mother. I often tell people that I was blessed with one parent who was as wonderful as two. She is a beautiful, brown-haired, olive-skinned beauty, and grocery store clerks often flirtatiously ask if she is my sister. She laughs it off, but I love the insinuation that I am anything like her, whether in appearance or character. She has taken her responsibility as my protector and guide in life with total seriousness. A testament to her grace, she has never spoken badly of my father. She never speaks of him at all. I have always wondered what she was trying to protect me from.

My fiancé is also a pillar in my life. Kind and honest, he is quick to remind me of my permanence in his life and, even more important, his faithful permanence in mine. When I share these thoughts about my father with him, he is perplexed. “Why do you even want him in your life?” I understand why he asks. For so long, I hid behind the idea that I was fine without him. Maybe it’s because my mother was so strong and independent without him. Maybe mine was a defensive posture — he abandoned me, so I abandoned him. But I am embarrassed to discover that, however illogical, I do care what he thinks of me. I don’t know that I want him in my life. But I want him to want to be in my life.

In the movie version of my world, he would send me a message and he would simply say he was sorry. It wouldn’t be enough, but it would be a start. I would respond, coolly but kindly. He would realize that I am no longer a child, that he must now form a relationship with an adult whose heart he has broken. But he won’t run. He will be too curious, he will persevere out of the voltage of his affection. He will ask questions about my job, my travel, my fiancé. He will even ask about my mom, because it will be so clear to him that she is everything to me. It will be awkward and it will be slow, but that is how some relationships unfold — slowly and carefully, beginning with a Facebook message.

In some dark moments, I believe that if he reaches out, it couldn’t have been my fault that he left 27 years ago. Even in my most rational, lucid moments – in those moments when I know an infant is never the only reason a marriage ends – I wish he could give me some kind of confirmation that it was all a big mistake, one that he’d take back if he could. I wish he would jump at the chance to know me, even if only through a computer screen. I still long for his approval.

But I suspect this confirmation will never come. He has not looked for me for nearly 30 years. Why would he start looking now?

For most of my life, I didn’t much worry about this. It was easy to pretend that if only he could see me, it would be impossible not to love me. He would see that I had worked hard for straight A’s and straight teeth. But Facebook has ruined that illusion. He can see all of these things. I have posted them for him and the world to see. He can see my best self, displayed in its pixelated glory, and he still won’t claim me. I worked so hard to do it all right, and somehow I’m still all wrong for him.

I won’t add him on Facebook, and I doubt he’ll add me. That wouldn’t make it all better anyway. But I’ll continue to do the hard work of all abandoned daughters. I will forgive because I cannot fill the hole he left with the anger and self-pity that will only prove to destroy me more. These are the dangerous emotions that will ruin the relationships in my life that I still value – my closeness with my mom, the trust I have in my fiancé – and I refuse to dwell on them. I will grow and move on; and I will continue to prove that, in spite of his absence, I have turned out all right.

The critique may well hold true for large deregulatory swathes of the new law — it didn’t generate massive Republican support for nothing, after all. But there’s one piece that’s getting unfairly castigated and it just happens to be something that could have enormous progressive potential. It’s the piece called “crowdfunding”: the Internet-enabled aggregation of lots of small sums of cash as way to raise capital for individuals or enterprises who would otherwise face an uphill battle getting the attention of banks or well-heeled investors.

The democratization of Wall Street could be a very good thing, especially if you’re looking for ways to invest your capital in local businesses that you value and want to succeed. The basic principle is not so hard to understand. New technological innovations can offer new ways of doing things. Last November, in my article “A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street,” I quoted the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Ian Galloway as he painted an enticing picture of the not-too-distant crowdfunding future.

“I can imagine a world not too far down the road,” says Galloway, “where you can walk down the street and pass a blighted piece of property, take a photo of it with your smartphone, click your CDFI [Community Development Financial Institution] app and have that photo geo-coded and sent to the local CDFI with your $25 investment in the predevelopment loan that would cause that property to be redeveloped.”

Sounds nice, no? But there was one major obstacle preventing the realization of that scenario. Securities regulations dating all the way back to the 1930s made it very difficult for anyone but the wealthiest Americans to invest in private companies and prevented online crowdfunding facilitators from offering any kind return on one’s investment — unless they jumped through an expensive series of regulatory hoops. Popular crowdfunding pioneers like Kiva and Kickstarter make do with donations, not investments.

The JOBS Act loosened those regulations. Now private startups will be able to raise as much as a million dollars through crowd-funding — although individual investments will be limited to a maximum of $10,000 or 10 percent of one’s net worth. The goal is open a whole new channel of funding that avoids the heavy-handed mediation of the big banks. You want to help that indie bookstore down the block expand its operations? Head to your nearest crowdfunding portal and plunk down some bucks.

But according to the critics, if you follow that urge, you’re a fool: the new legislation’s main result weill be a new generation of marks lining up to be fleeced by scamsters. Crowdfunding, writes economist Robert Reich, is just a means “by which people whose net worth is less than $100,000 can gamble away (invest) up to 5 percent of their annual incomes in any get-rich-quick scam (start-up) that any huckster (entrepreneur) may sell them…. ” Jack E. Herstein, NASAA president and assistant director of the Nebraska Department of Banking & Finance, Bureau of Securities, declares that the relaxation of rules on advertising, in combination with the crowdfunding elements, will mean that “investors need to prepare themselves to be bombarded with all manner of offerings and sales pitches. Congress has just released every huckster, scam artist, and small business owner and salesman onto the Internet.” Writing in Forbes, John Wasik argues that “although it seems to be a decentralized way of creating wealth — perhaps bypassing Wall Street — the vampire squid financiers who brought us 2008 will still find a way to game the system.”

So why won’t all that bad stuff happen? Crowdfunding advocates offer two related defenses. First, times are much different than they were in the 1930s, when the original securities regulations were written, and second: the “wisdom of the crowd” will step in to identify frauds and cheats, while promoting those who actually do deserve support.

Times are certainly different, As Amy Cortese, author of “Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing,” explained to me, back in the day, it was much harder to investigate a scamster’s background.

“It was usually some fast-talking huckster from the East Coast going out to the farmers and widows in Kansas and selling them shares in some can’t miss speculative deal,” said Cortese, “a mine somewhere or some land deal, and it was always far away and they had no way of vetting it. Now it is just a completely different environment on the Internet. People know other people, there are social relationships — I think there is just a greater level of scrutiny with a lot of eyes.”

“The best way for an individual investor to reduce the risk of fraud,” added Cortese, “is to keep it local where there are social bonds and relationships and knowledge of the market.”

Mike Norman, co-founder of the prospective crowdfunding portal WeFunder, believes that identity verification through social media and the collective intelligence of the communities that cohere around crowdfunding sites will cut through the flim-flam.

“That’s where the wisdom of the crowd really plays a mitigating effect,” said Norman. “If you are able to get a couple of hundred people to comment on a specific company and say for example ‘look I know something about zoning in Boston and this business is never going to get off the ground because the state is never going to allow this particular facility here’, and enough other people endorse that comment then you are able to use the Internet to crowdsource expertise, I think part of what is going to differentiate good portals from bad portals is their ability to actually make sure that the good information is rising to the top, rather than bad information, and a big piece of that is the ability to thumbs up and thumbs down, to endorse a certain comment or not.”

Not everyone is so sanguine. James Kwak, a blogger at The Baseline Scenario, dismissed the notion that social media could provide sophisticated consumer protection as absurd.

“Social networks and online communities tend to generate activity around things that are interesting, not things that are boring,” explained Kwak in an email. “So maybe if someone is selling equity in his project to mine gold from asteroids, then a lot of people would ask hard questions. But there is also enormous opportunity for boring fraud: Just imagine some legitimate, boring business idea, tell people you’re going to pursue that idea, and pocket their money. Given that only a small fraction of all the capital-raising ventures out there will get any serious attention, counting on the crowd seems optimistic to me.”

Maybe the skeptics will be proved right, and instead of using our smartphones to direct our capital to the local urban farming startup, we’ll end up getting an endless amount of spam on our phones trying to convince us to invest in the latest iteration of Florida swampland. But maybe this time we shouldn’t let our skepticism win out over optimism. As economist Robert Schiller explained in an op-ed piece in the New York Times on Monday, not all financial innovation is bad. And if doesn’t work out quite as planned the first time round, then fix it!

[Crowdfunding] might be as well received as Wikipedia, which is constantly being updated and improved by a vast army of users. There may well be disappointments at first, but the concept can be tinkered with, like other democratizing financial innovations that have eventually delivered much good to society… Finance is substantially about controlling risk. If risk management is suitably democratized, and if its sophisticated tools are better dispersed throughout society, it could help reduce social inequality.

So don’t throw the crowdfunding baby out with all the rest of the venture-capital-and-Wall-Street-friendly JOBS Act bathwater. Give it a chance.