First, admit you have a problem...
Feb. 1st, 2009 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoJames Warren has a piece in The Atlantic that raises the usual complaint by old-line journos about blogs:
"As I write, the headline on the lead Huffington Post story is about the Bush administration “Burrowing Political Appointees into Career Civil Service Positions.” Upon closer inspection, this Huffington Post Story turned out to be a truncated version of what was in fact a quite interesting Washington Post story. (And upon even closer inspection, the actual story made clear that this had been common practice among all administrations in their final days and cited about 50 examples of the Bill Clinton administration doing the same thing.)
The cooption of that Post story serves as a clear reminder of the extent to which newspapers serve as daily tip sheets for other media outlets."
So, what's the problem here?
The problem is, the newspapers themselves routinely crib from each other, and there's far less "original" journalism than one might think from the whingewave from older outlets.
C.J. Koch called them "matchers" in The Year of Living Dangerously, drawn directly from his experiences as a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in the 1960s. Tim Crouse called it "pack journalism," in The Boys on the Bus.
I realize I'm laying myself open to my own traditional, "If Johnny was to jump off the Empire State Building..." critique. But writing that one is shocked, shocked, I say! that bloggers feed off the press when the press itself has been feeding off each other for decades is perhaps the most lame of all possible criticisms of blogging as a threat to journalism.
Or to riff on an earlier post riffing on Clay Shirky: Have you ever seen the news story where you're told there're a bunch of reporters at an event, but not much is happening just then, so they all end up interviewing each other? I've seen that story. A lot.
"As I write, the headline on the lead Huffington Post story is about the Bush administration “Burrowing Political Appointees into Career Civil Service Positions.” Upon closer inspection, this Huffington Post Story turned out to be a truncated version of what was in fact a quite interesting Washington Post story. (And upon even closer inspection, the actual story made clear that this had been common practice among all administrations in their final days and cited about 50 examples of the Bill Clinton administration doing the same thing.)
The cooption of that Post story serves as a clear reminder of the extent to which newspapers serve as daily tip sheets for other media outlets."
So, what's the problem here?
The problem is, the newspapers themselves routinely crib from each other, and there's far less "original" journalism than one might think from the whingewave from older outlets.
C.J. Koch called them "matchers" in The Year of Living Dangerously, drawn directly from his experiences as a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in the 1960s. Tim Crouse called it "pack journalism," in The Boys on the Bus.
I realize I'm laying myself open to my own traditional, "If Johnny was to jump off the Empire State Building..." critique. But writing that one is shocked, shocked, I say! that bloggers feed off the press when the press itself has been feeding off each other for decades is perhaps the most lame of all possible criticisms of blogging as a threat to journalism.
Or to riff on an earlier post riffing on Clay Shirky: Have you ever seen the news story where you're told there're a bunch of reporters at an event, but not much is happening just then, so they all end up interviewing each other? I've seen that story. A lot.
