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Alex Beam's latest dispatch just in via telegraph!
By adamg on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 3:04pm
Alex Beam harrumphs again about these kids and their newfangled "digital" cameras, or something:
I suppose civic journalism has morphed into laughable "citizens" journalism, where random jokers point their cellphones at news events and dilate accordingly. Did you follow the Huffington Post's inane "citizen ground level campaign coverage" feature "Off the Bus" last year? Don't feel bad; no one else did either.
Do you follow Beam's inane ranting about kids on his lawn? Don't feel bad, no one else does either, now that he's back of the funny pages. I only heard about his column today by reading about it on Adam Reilly's blog.
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Comments
I'm sure it would be OK if
I'm sure it would be OK if the citizen journalist simply blogged from a table at Locke-Ober while a couple of political insiders improperly picked up the tab for lobster bisque.
Don't get it
I don't get the criticism of his criticism. He makes a weak argument but isn't it valid? Isn't the Huffington Post just a rehash of articles appearing in the mainstream media? Also, how can citizen-led "journalism" in any way replace mainstream media? As I wrote in Dan Kennedy's blog, won't you just end up with "infomration" but no "news" if we continue down this road?
If you ignore the messenger, isn't Beam's message worthy of thought?
False dichotomy
A.K.A. strawman.
If it were just Huffington Post, sure, let's all join in and bash this bastard stepchild of a media butterfly whose business model seems to consist of a) convincing people to make her money by writing for her for free and b) ripping off news organizations (and bloggers, too, at least with her "local" model).
But Beam lists a string of "failures" on the part of new-media efforts to prove that new media sucks and the future is old media. Never mind that one of his failures was an early effort by a newspaper chain. Never mind that the old professional journalists/bloggers "debate" is mainly promulgated by people like Beam who seem like the guy in the Monty Python sketch desperately in search of a good argument. And never mind that it's old media that's hemorrhaging money, not new media.
I'm not one to argue that citizen journalism will replace professional journalism. I will argue that citizen journalism can tell you things you won't read in the MSM (where's boston.com's "Your Town" site for the South End?), can do a decent job on breaking news (remember when the entire T died when somebody tripped on a cable or something? That was on Twitter well before any professional journalists got on the case) and give you a different take on events than tired, worn down Big Media columnists (in addition to today's Beam opus, we also have Adrian Walker today bringing us the shocking news that Tom Menino doesn't like to debate).
Yes, we still need people who practice journalism for a living to give us investigative reporting and to explain why things happened once the initial story is done.
One of these days, somebody is going to figure out how to marry the best of both worlds.
Good points
Those are good points to contemplate.
Re: the T breaking down - proves my point. Riders gave out the information that it wasn't working but it took a news organization to find out why.
Valid points
Just because you can call GoDaddy, buy a domain, set up a CMS, and post snarky one-paragraph posts until the cows come home doesn't mean you have anything useful to contribute. The MSM may have something to learn from new media, but quite frankly if I want real information I'm not going to Twitter or someone's blog - mainly because I don't know who someone on Twitter is or how reliable their information is. New media is about immediacy, and immediacy is diametrically opposed to stopping, counting to ten, and thinking about the implications of what one is about to say.
Absolutely
Over time, you decide whom to trust - with both new-media type and old-media types.