Worcestershire Journal – News, not news, rinse, repeat – Part 2
by Karl - March 15, 2009 7:26am
Dianne Wiiliamson, Worcester Telegram, March 1, 2009
The current breathless brouhaha regarding bloggers, the future of newspapers and the news industry, the World Wide Web, and the Twittersphere is just one more round in a centuries-old struggle to define what it means to think and act on those thoughts in society.
- Socrates ranted about the invention of writing, that it would lead to weakening of memory.
- The texts that form the foundation of Christianty were established by committee. Other commentary on the life and times of Jesus, the bloggers of their time, didn’t make the cut.
- Thoreau was singularly unimpressed when the telegraph brought news from Europe:
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
To Henry, faster news delivery, even from “trained to report the news fairly and objectively,” only hastened the delivery of trivia that drained the human soul of its vitality.
Jim Cramer of CNBC, we learn, is a Harvard-educated reporter who, along with others in the business news profession, failed spectactularly in his responsibility to tell us what he knew about how the heavily-leveraged financial instruments could and would bring down our economic infrastructure. He was skilled, he was paid, and he was wrong.
Meanwhile, some of us who write “for fun” can and do bring more than 30 years of professional writing experience in area ranging from local, state, and national government, murders, and fires to Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop file servers and the increasing number of men as administrative assistants. (I wrote an article for a trade journal about my experience as an office temp in the Kelly Girl division of Kelly Services.) The Web, by the intent of its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, affords us the opportunity to write for an audience that, by now, numbers in the many 10s.
So, where does that leave us? We’re still figuring that out, just like Wallace and Gromit building a train track as they go along. We’ll get there, for varying values of there, and it’ll be interesting.
Years ago, my mother established what she called Hakkarainen Clipping Service. She’d send books, magazines, newspaper articles, and other bits of printed material to a friend who might be interested, usually with a note “No need to read, acknowledge, or return.” It’s how I learned about blogging decades before the Intertubes – sharing interesting stuff in any way you can, for free, because ideas matter.
Karl, thank you for addressing this issue, and, as we all know, bloggers do have a place at the “reporting” table.
Many times, reporters miss the other side of a story and that void is filled by us “non-reporters” and people that spout-off about nothing.
Well, as the old saying goes, “Change is inevitable, except from vending machines,” news reporting has changed and there’s no turning back now!
It should also be noted that there is a distinct difference between a columnist and a reporter. I’m just pointing it out because no one else is.
I am a firm believer that we need all – the reporters, the columnists and the bloggers. They are three distinct voices and perspectives. How can anyone expect to have a conversation or development of community and ideas if there’s nothing but a one-way push of information.
Thank you for that. It is very good read.
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