Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Cool, maybe
I'll be arriving in Cambridge tomorrow evening, right along with thunderstorms that I hope won't delay landing at Logan.
Looking toward Wikimania
Rex Hammock: I feel there's a gathering in the making.
Who are, or were, these people?
Only a little more plausible than snakes
Debate vs. Growth
On the one hand, Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists, a piece by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker's August 7 issue. On the same hand, Journalism of all kinds and the process of growing, by Mitch Ratcliffe, in ZDNet.
About Lemann's piece, Mitch writes,
My guess is that the blogosphere will take it badly, minimizing the argument as another "journalism vs. bloggers" rant. It's not.
Lemann's argument, in two sentences:
It sounds obvious, but reporting requires reporters. They don’t have to be priests or gatekeepers or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the work.
Mitch's responses, in a few excerpted paragraphs:
The debate is not whether bloggers are journalists, though many believe they are, but whether there is a process, the one professionalized as "journalism," that is valuable enough to preserve in an era when barriers to communication are radically lowered...
What must be embraced by the citizen journalists out there is the rigor and self-criticism that journalism represents. Where Nicholas Lemann's critique of citizen journalism falls down is his lack of critical reflection on journalism itself. Yes, most citizen journalism today looks like church newsletter writing, but so does a lot of "real" journalism. The celebrity-and-spin mechanism has taken such thorough hold of the mainstream that good journalism is the exception there, too...
I want us to think and debate as a society, and citizen journalism, especially when it learns from the standards of professional journalism, can help us do that. The more voices the better, but let's set up the expectation that participation must be informed and rigorous in its self-criticism, the same as the Founding Fathers believed, conducted in the midst of change rather than seeking a conclusion that exists whole and unassailed by change on either side of tremendous social upheaval. History is a living document, not a process with a defined goal; let us, therefore, have processes that repair human shortcomings and leave history to history while we sort out the problem of living today.
This isn't blogging vs. journalism we're talking about, it's a matter of how humanity will continue to grow up.
I agree.
Hurrycane Season
In Looking Back: Hurricane Katrina Blogging, Young CEO gets a jump on the first anniversary of the disaster by looking back at the roles played by one of the most useful post-Katrina blogs.