I'm an old media guy and I love newspapers, but they were brought down by a long period of gluttonous profits when they were run as monopolies by large, phlegmatic, semi-literate men who endowed schools of journalism that labored mightily to stamp out any style or originality and to create a cadre of reliable transcribers. That was their role, crushing writers and rolling them into cookie dough. Nobody who compares newspaper writing to the swashbuckling world of blogging can have any doubt where the future lies. Bloggers are writers who've been liberated from editors, and some of them take you back to the thrilling days of frontier journalism, before the colleges squashed the profession.
The rest of this nice essay can be found
here.
Comments (6)
I could go along with most of that, but a lot of blogs could use a good editor.
Posted by Gil Johnson | August 13, 2009 10:42 PM
Oh, I do hate to have to agree with Keillor on anything, but he is dead on with this one. The traditional media get worse every day. I just read on HuffPo that the WaPo coordinated its publication of some recent exposé with the very high government agency exposed. This was the paper that wrung open Watergate! Operative word there is "was". I deleted the WaPo feed from my RSS reader. RIP the old Post.
Posted by dyspeptic | August 13, 2009 11:01 PM
He's a national treasure. Boy howdy did he nail that one.
Posted by Pat Malach | August 13, 2009 11:12 PM
Kodachrome.
Posted by David E Gilmore | August 14, 2009 7:00 AM
The print media has gone from government watch dog to government lap dog. We used to be able to trust the print media for accurate and unbiased information most of the time but no more.
Posted by Britt Storkson | August 14, 2009 9:48 AM
I'm reminded of the comment "The only people who get into journalism today are those who are too inept for medicine, too inarticulate for law, and too lazy and arrogant for food service."
Posted by Texas Triffid Ranch | August 14, 2009 11:36 AM