Feral Beast: Old Skool screed scribbler bashes new media pundit

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Old Skool screed scribbler bashes new media pundit

James Camp of mediaite holds forth on Leon Weiseltier's Sullivan Smackdown. Is Leon a tad anti-Semantic

What is striking about all this is how it inverts our expectations of conduct in old and new media. Typically – stereotypically – one goes online to read rants, raves, the gung-ho and the bozo of the opinion-makers. Whereas one looks to the old media – magazines, journals, newspapers – for understatement, decorum, moderation. Rickety as it may be, the general assumption is that print journalism is more accountable than its online cousins. Yet in this instance, the opposite holds. The man in print is the mudslinger, the paranoiac, the screed-scribbler; while the blogger ends up looking not only right but restrained, old-fashioned, even. And we are able to judge this easily enough for ourselves — we don’t have to take it on authority — precisely because of that most bewitching novelty of the net, the hyperlink.

No comments:

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.