By Katharine Mieszkowski If you can get past the monotone delivery, there are some real zingers in the 15-minute video "chat wrap" with the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Reader Rep Ted Diadiun, in which he defends columnist Connie Schultz's proposal to curtail the First Amendment to save newspapers.
On Twitter, Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, and PressThink blogger, dubs the video: "Bonfire of the curmudgeons, inter-generational sneerfest from the Cleveland ombud. Painful, but revealing video."
After lauding the journalistic might of the Plain Dealer's newsroom with a staff of 240, Didiun goes on to dismiss the the blogsphere, where Schultz has been taking a lot of heat from the likes of BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York.
"It's really a bunch of pipsqueaks out there talking about what the real journalists do," Didiun says. It sure sounds like the Plain Dealer's "reader rep" thinks that his paper's readers need to be protected from what the blogosphere has to say about what's being published in his newspaper.
Exactly what is the difference, in Didiun's view, between columnist Connie Schultz, who I feel confident he would consider a "real journalist," publishing her opinions in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and bloggers, like Jarvis, posting their opinions online? I would love for Didiun to tell me. But I'm sure he'd consider me a pipsqueak, by virtue of the fact that I'm using blogging software to pose the question, so I'm not very optimistic about getting a substantive response.
mandalp1
Richard Davis
Chris Rywalt
Blue Roses
whitenoise
Anupum Mehrotra
Salon.com
Comments
1. You cannot tell me that reporters at the Plain Dealer do not read other newspapers and then use what they find there. I'm in the biz, babe. I'm doing it, have always done it. When I sit down to write about something that a rival paper has covered, the first thing my editor does is to put that article in my hands and say, "Read this, fungo bat." Whereupon I start looking for angles that their guy has missed, yes, but I also start rewriting the boilerplate stuff to suit me. The fact that it's infinitely better when I get done with it is just a happy accident. I've been doing this gig for 25 years, have worked at dailies, have worked for the NYT Women's Magazine Group, even (you can just stare at me while I catch my breath), and this has been the norm throughout. And I have read the Plain Dealer, by the way, and I'm pretty sure "pipsqueak" could be added to one or two job descriptions over there.
2. The blogosphere really is that roomful of typing monkeys, and more writers of various stripes are going to be covering more stories in the same way, from the same perspective, at the same freakin' time, and if you throw out Fair Use and start taking names whenever things sorta line up, you're going to strain the system beyond functionality. There just ain't enough lawyers and courts and all to cover a flustercluck of those proportions.
3. Somebody better break this to Didiun: Newspapers are going the way of the dodo. The world is turning, and even the mighty Plain Dealer will have to just Plain Deal with it.
The Internet and the Blogsphere has become the true Marketplace of Ideas (albeit good and bad).
That really no longer applies. True democratization of media means access to all - and the ability of anyone to disseminate his or her views almost entirely unfiltered. Up sides, down sides - some suggested here among the comments, so no need for me to elaborate. If "i-reporters" abound, and some are bloggers, it requires us all to be even savvier as consumers of media. And in my mind's eye, that's a good thing.
There are a lot of great writers out there... some with observations on the news, some with actual stories and news.
If MSM is uncomfortable with that, it'll have to come to terms with itself. Pandora's box is open - there's no putting the blogosphere back inside. Nor would I have it that way, were it my choice.
Fungo bat? Editors can be so cruel.
Which has the inordinate amount of crap?
Or do you just mean they have different crap? Paranoid navel-gazing blogger vs. Ghost of Dear Abby: Which is crappier?
king
I'm so tired of old-media journalists ranting about the "blogosphere" as if the medium itself removed all credibility from the written word. It's like saying: "Most books that are published are rubbish. Therefore, you can't learn anything from reading books."
Sure, I'm a pipsqueak. But many bloggers are, in fact, excellent journalists, and good reporting is good no matter how it's published. Furthermore: A journalist who does his/her job well will not fear independent fact-checking. Only those who have sloppy work to hide need to whine about blogs dissecting their writing.
But I do think that today, on the net, you have to search through some really atrocious writing to much out the good stuff on blogs. Once you find them, bookmarking is a blessing, just as turning to the page with one's favorite columnist was a blessing.
I guess, considering the open plain of the internet, the number of people writing is wonderful in a way. Gives so many more minds a place to jot what's on it.
But you know what? Ignoring the invention of the Internet, if you could have, at any time in history, taken everything in every newspaper in the world, or in the country, or in the English language, and thrown it all in one place, so you'd have to sort through to find the good stuff, you'd have experienced the same thing: "Holy cow, I have to sort through a LOT of crap (potholes in Abilene? Maple syrup recipes from Nova Scotia? High school football roundup from Boise? Op-ed about the school board in Greenville?), both because they're poorly written and because they're not of interest to me, before I get to the pieces I find useful."
But you had a sorting mechanism: Your favorite newspaper. You chose that newspaper because of some combination of its quality and its locality. You asked it to sort through the crap for you and give you a package of stories that you would further sort upon receipt, reading what interested you most. Your local newspaper might have done a good job at this, or a lousy job. But you didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. If you lived in Abilene, you probably read the Abiline newspaper. Maybe there were two or three where you lived. Eventually you had USA Today. Maybe you sprung for the national edition of the New York Times.
With the Web, you're the sorter. Of course it's easier when someone else does it, but if you want something done right ...
There is a large and growing number of tools and mechanisms you can employ to do this sorting. Eventually, I think, a major role for professional journalists will be to do this type of sorting -- the buzzwords in the industry are "aggregation" and "curation."
But you would have to convince me that the ratio of good stuff to crap, for any individual reader, is different today than it would have been, say, 20 years ago, if you could have had full access to everything back then.
Signed,
king
:)
Once upon a time in the world of the newspaper, even the meanest daily had a system wherein reporters reported their lil' stories and printed them out linotronically, after an editor of some sort had read and approved the story. Whereupon the paste up people would trim the paper, paste the columns up there on the board, and then stand around looking at 'em. And more often than not, someone would say something like, "Wait a minute, that ain't how you spell that word!" Or a cutline would not go with a particular photo or whatever — this, after at least one other pair of eyes had gone over the story and headline. At least five people would see the paper up there on that easel before it went into the Room Of Darkness to be photographed and put to bed.
Nowadays, a reduced staff of reporters are putting out more or less the same number of stories in a given day, which may or may not be spellchecked — which does not help all that much, hate to tell ya — and then put in the queue, where a very harried editor gives it the once over — if she has time! — and then, more often than not, gets to paginate that sucker, as in, design the friggin' page around the ad template, and then do the DTP layout voodoo. After which she says, Okay, let's get out of here, and you do. Hasta la bye-bye, paper.
But the deadlines HAVE NOT CHANGED. The papers are printed at the same time, pretty much everywhere, and inserted and bundled and stacked for the delivery crew. So the people who would otherwise be responsible for grammatical, factual and textual errors have nowhere near enough time for that kind of stuff: they're just stressed about getting the layout done and the paper out on time. So what you get is a flawed product that is static and beyond your ability to fix. You'll print a correction tomorrow or next week. Meanwhile, your mistakes might as well be carved in granite.
But here on the Fabulous Infobahn, you can write, post — reread, find your mistake, and then go back and fix your story before anybody squeaks. And you get instant feedback from readers, meaning your other readers are being dynamically informed around the relative weaknesses and strengths of your story, making for a more informed reader and a more responsive news organ.
Sez I.