[Leica] In defence of the newspapers

[pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein)]

I just read that two big-time bloggers actually died at their computers in 
the last couple of years. Another had a heart attack, but survived. 
Blogging is a 24/7 business where getting your piece out a second later 
than the other person may mean you don't get read.  And we thought 
newspaper deadlines stifled quality.

The article was in The New York Times.  I read it in print.

I think that journalism and the arts are in the same boat.  The digital 
revolution has turned everything upside down.  The economic models have 
been broken.  New ones are taking their place, but everything is up for 
grabs.  The owners of the outlets used to leave the creative people a few 
crumbs. But now they are unashamedly claiming the whole pie, in 
perpetuity.  Plus, now everybody can do horribly what it took training and 
practice to do badly (or well) before.  Craft is dead, drowned in a sea of 
garbage.  And the speed and noise of the age makes considered and complex 
thought more difficult to exercise and less likely to be appreciated.

I remember when the Kaypro and the Osbourne (CP/M personal computers) first 
came out.  I thought, "Oh, good, now I can write more efficiently, maybe 
get more done."  Yes, I could.  But eventually, so could every other jerk 
in the world.  It used to be that everybody thought they could write. Now 
everybody and their uncle and their illegitimate sister-in-law thinks they 
can write. So the volume of junk out there has increased exponentially.

The same goes for photography, as Tina and Ted and others have 
chronicled.  I think it's much harder for good work to be recognized.  If 
an editor has a couple dozen photographs in front of him or her, it's 
possible to look at them all and pick the best.  If there are several 
hundred, overload sets in, the temptation is to pick one, any one that will 
do, and go home.  And if you have "citizen journalists" who will glady give 
up all rights in return for getting their picture in the paper, and the 
public tolerates it, then why bother having real photographers?

The New Yorker article does talk about some positives:  The possibilities 
for democratization of the media, for alternative voices being heard via 
the Web, that in the blogosphere, fact-checking can be done after the 
article is published.   It also acknowledges that falsehoods can spread 
forever even if they're corrected within a few minutes.

Still, I'm concerned that the speed at which everything moves makes it 
almost impossible for quality to exist or be appreciated.  And as W.S. 
Gilbert observed over a century ago, "when everybody's somebody, then no 
one's anybody."

--Peter

At 02:03 PM 4/10/2008 -0700, Tina wrote:
>Who is going to do
>the investigative journalism that makes a difference in the
>world?  True, there ares some web-blogs by journalists but how can
>anybody make a living doing web-blogs?  Bah-humbug!
>
>Tina