 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Discussion Membership
|
Blather be gone![Note: PressThink has an essay called "Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die". I've had enough of it.] Blather be gone! Journalism is not the talking about it. It's getting into the trenches to f***ing do it! Then it's f***ing trying to do it better the next day. The Malone's of the world aren't worth the free packets to carry their message. Their signal to noise ratio is zero, and to spend time analyzing noise only adds more noise. You cannot amplify what isn't there. I am a journalist who is better than most because my waking hours both at work and at home are spent not just serving the community in the transitory traditional means, but also dreaming into reality something more effective, more complete, more affordable, and more socially sensitive. Why? Because community is civilization and my family's safety depends on it. This is not our newspaper. We may "own" it, but we hold it in stewardship for the community. We always have. More importantly, in this Middle Age of oppressive taxation throttling local economic engines and misguided educationism choking schools, the press is the only independent institution with sufficient agility to interconnect the community to help them recognize the drag, label it for what it is, and create a vortex of willpower, organized to make due with very little money, to pull ourselves into a renaissance. Meanwhile, on the periphery, in the clatter of blog comment threads, celebration of the renaissance is already underway. Their celebration is premature, because underneath the comment ferment, there is precious little difference between this internet generation and the passive boomer/boomer-baby TV-watchers. They just watch different screens, engaged in the casual luxury of a tea party serving style, abstraction, conjecture, and entertainment. What one needs lay gently down to die is not the newspaper, but the the silly culture where having an idea is reason enough to believe it to be true, where our team counts and theirs does not, where shouting louder must be true, were organization counts more than understanding, and where perceptions must be real. [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "commentIt".]
|
|
||
|
