Michael Hirschorn has an interesting piece on the possibly-imminent death of the "doorstop" print edition of the New York Times in the Atlantic this month. He comes out at the end on the right side–hey it's not the end of the world, it's just a different world. But there's also some fogeyism. First the smart bits:
kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart
middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have,
until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind.
This is brilliant. I've been thinking it myself. I realize that the huge fees I got from MSM for OK-but-not-memorable pieces became a true market inefficiency in the internet age for several parties to the deal, chiefly the reader. My former wealth reflected captive advertisers and corporatized expression. The captured advertisers were used by print monopolies to subsidize a lot of the Right People, and the selection process was arbitrary and highly exclusive, even if it included me. I don't know how good that was for the world. Look: now you're getting my pearls for peanuts, and they're the true motions of my mind, not edited by some cya committee.
live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to
literally cover every inch of it. In an optimistic scenario, the
remaining reporters—now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases—could use
their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of
others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world
unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic
form.
Smart. And Hirschorn reflects the fact that in a global world, the Times is offering a provincial brand. Which is one reason its irrelevance is growing.
recent media breakfast, the blogging and local reporting from Mumbai in
the early hours of the November terrorist attacks were nothing short of
remarkable.
Also true. Now here's the fogy bit:
defined most of our adult lives… And it will
seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of
democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a
new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now,
at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can
marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience
I find this unpersuasive. There's more and better information available to people now than there ever was. Intelligent people will have to sort out their information as they always have. New institutions will arise just as old institutions arose (the New York Times, the late lamented New York Herald-Tribune, the New York Review of Books) and will be assessed, as human beings have always assessed their gruel: How good is it?
Let's write the word Iraq on the blackboard 100 times, or 1000. Elites got us into that war, with elite mechanisms, including the elite press. This is the present American tragedy. I don't think the internet would have given us Iraq. We would have heard from more bloggers over there, to begin with. For another thing, the internet is ultimately going to reform the Islamic world. (And maybe the Jewish world too). The new mechanisms are specially vulnerable, yes, but in the end they are a great leap forward. I'm not going to reverence journalistic training. It turns out that Millions of people, schooled
by email, know how to write and observe.
Here is the best analogy for the internet: Religious leader Jan Hus is burned at the stake in the 1400s for challenging Rome. Gutenberg then invents the printing press; religious texts are vastly democratized. Luther reforms Rome.
And that syllogism comes to you from Nabil al-Khowaiter, a Saudi Arabian, who I would not know if not for the damned internet.
