Personal media junkies will want to—

Read: Amateur Hour: Journalism Without Journalists
In: August 8 issue of The New Yorker, which has a bad habit of not always putting its stories about media online so non-subscribers can read, though in this case wisely do
By: Nicholas Lehmann, Columbia U. journalism prof

What’s the story?

Lehmann writes about the tension between bloggers and journalists, citizen journalism and professional journalism, pointing out, among other things, “most bloggers see themselves as engaging only in personal expression; they don’t inspire the biggest claims currently being made for Internet journalism.” (He cites a recent Pew study, Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers).

Something else that’s obvious but always nice to read in a magazine that not only my friends and colleagues read, but my mom, neighbor, and seemingly everyone on the D train from Atlantic Avenue to midtown Manhattan clutch for dear life these days, is the notion that not all Internet journalism is the same. “Every new medium generates its own set of personalities and forms,” he writes, “Internet journalism is a huge tent that encompasses sites from traditional news organizations; Web-only magazines like Slate and Salon; sites like Daily Kos and NewsMax, which use some notional connection to the news to function as influential political actors; and aggregation sites (for instance, Arts & Letters Daily and Indy Media) that bring together an astonishingly wide range of disparate material in a particular category. The more ambitious blogs, taken together, function as a form of fast-moving, densely cross-referential pamphleteering—an open forum for every conceivable opinion that can’t make its way into the big media, or, in the case of the millions of purely personal blogs, simply an individual’s take on life.” As Bill Goggins might say: Amen.

Keep reading for another bit of the piece I like quite a lot.

The best original Internet journalism happens more often by accident, when smart and curious people with access to means of communication are at the scene of a sudden disaster. Any time that big news happens unexpectedly, or in remote and dangerous places, there is more raw information available right away on the Internet than through established news organizations. The most memorable photographs of the London terrorist bombing last summer were taken by subway riders using cell phones, not by news photographers, who didn’t have time to get there. There were more ordinary people than paid reporters posting information when the tsunami first hit South Asia, in 2004, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, in 2005, and when Israeli bombs hit Beirut this summer. I am in an especially good position to appreciate the benefits of citizen journalism at such moments, because it helped save my father and stepmother’s lives when they were stranded in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: the citizen portions of the Web sites of local news organizations were, for a crucial day or two, one of the best places to get information about how to drive out of the city. But, over time, the best information about why the hurricane destroyed so much of the city came from reporters, not citizens.