Feral Beast: Huffy Arianna doesn't wanna pay her scribes

Friday, December 12, 2008

Huffy Arianna doesn't wanna pay her scribes

Huffington Post, the LA-based aggregate website which has lost steam since the election of Barack Obama, is about to launch a new "citizen journalist" foreign bureau. However, the Greek heiress is not about to pass around much cash from her latest bounty. Articles that are not the celebrity vanity sort of posting will be provided for free by volunteer hacks (perhaps deluded that this constitutes journalism?) Hari-kari, more like it.

One wonders, now that on-line only articles will be eligible for the Pulitzer Prize, if the poor authors will get any of the prize money, should they win for the Mother Ship.

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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.