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.

Superman vs the Newspaper Apocalypse

Hmmm...this cartoon is the last gasp from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's David Horsey, before it all went down. The moral, folks: even Superman gets the no news blues and he writes for a fictional newspaper, the Daily Planet!

contrarian's contrarian simply cancels himself out

Thumbs down on Andrew Keen's book, Cult of the amateur: How today's internet is killing our culture and destroying our economy. Why is this guy anti-blogging prof getting any attention? He's a throwback with far less savvy than most of the MSM (er, mainstream media, for those still baffled by blogging terms.)
Commentator Roy Greenslade quotes critic Jeff Jarvis, as someone who is not especially keen on this polemical book:

"Keen wants to be the contrarian's contrarian. But that only makes him a double negative. It makes him a curmudgeon, a conservative trying to hold on to the past, a mastadon growling against the warm wind of change."