Feral Beast: Librarian of Congress reads no magazines

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Librarian of Congress reads no magazines

The head honcho at the US Library of Congress, after 20 years in the job, says he wastes no time reading magazines. Periodicals, bah. There's barely enough time to skim "The Week". James H Billington, who considers himself the knowledge navigator for the nation, confessed:
"I don't have time to read magazines. I have three or four friends around the country, and they send me, irregularly, things they think I ought to read. They know my interests...with TV news, I avoid the drivel stories. I switch immediately when it turns to Britney Spears or these other ridiculous things."

No wonder they say ours is a dying industry.

Yet magazines saw an increase in ad spending for the first half of this year, thanks mainly to the drugs and remedies category, which scored double-digit revenue and page growth, at 17 and 11 percent, respectively. Blame the aging baby boomers with their aches and pains.

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.