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. (more…)
