You blog, therefore you aren’t
A journalist, that is. Columbia Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann has a few choice words for self-aggrandizing bloggers. This ought to send them into a fugue state.
One of the more amusing examples of bloggish journalism Lemann offers is an “interview” with New York Times tech reporter John Markoff, which was conducted by Jeff Jarvis, whose responses to Markoff were added after the fact.
MARKOFF:
I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may
only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create
something better to replace them with. I think that’s certainly one
scenario.
JARVIS:
Pardon me for interrupting, but that made no frigging sense whatsoever.
Can you parse that for me, Mr. Markoff? Or do you need an editor to
speak sense? How do new standards “destroy” old standards? Something
won’t become a “standard” unless it is accepted by someone in power—the
publishers or the audiences. This isn’t a game of PacMan.
MARKOFF:
The other possibility right now—it sometimes seems we have a world full
of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least
that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet
whether blogging is anything more than CB radio.
JARVIS:
The reference is as old-farty and out-of-date as the sentiment. It’s
clear that Markoff isn’t reading weblogs and doesn’t know what’s there.
Hey, fool, that’s your audience talking there. You should want to listen to what they have to say. You are, after all, spending your living writing for them.
If you were a reporter worth a damn, you’d care to know what the
marketplace cares about. But, no, you’re the mighty NYT guy. You don’t
need no stinking audience. You don’t need ears. You only need a mouth.
Jarvis will be a professor of journalism at the City University of New York this fall.
We should quickly add that Jarvis will be “will be working for the New York Times Co. as editor of the services guide About.com, whose $410 million acquisition Jarvis had questioned. (He says he’ll still critique the paper’s journalism but not its business decisions.) ” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/29/AR2005052901075.html
I think that Lemann is far too defensive about traditional journalism. Every magazine and newspaper has its biases and it is extremely rare that they will give equal or even 50% coverage to those who disagree with their editorial opinion.
Jarvis does deserve some credit for being able to blast traditional media while enjoying very lucrative work with them.
No question it will be difficult to find articles such as the Lemann one in the blogosphere. But how many print media can compete with the New Yorker, anyway?
I am not sure whether Lemann’s assertion that blogs constitute nothing more than an alternative to the op-ed page, is true. At the same time, it is clear that many great articles have been rejected by the elite op-ed page.
I thing it is great that we can find them (or write them) on the blogs.
Is Jarvis the Steve Coulter of the establishment in a strange kind of way? Amazing how Jarvis flourishes biting the hand that feeds him.
That Jarvis is admonishing anyone to listen is somewhat ironic, since he exhibits his own inability to listen in this snippet.
Evidence his accusing Markoff of “making no frigging sense” in saying that new standards will destroy the old standards. Which, of course, isn’t what Markoff said. He said that new TECHNOLOGY might destroy old standards without offering something better (presumeably new standards) to replace them with.
In other words, Markoff is concerned with having no standards, the lack of which Jarvis illustrates nicely.