I should disclose that I do not own a television and haven’t read a newspaper with intent for at least a couple of years - I’ve perused some online articles of various publication (almost all American) but a physical dead tree hasn’t smuged my fingers in a long while.
Do I miss it? No - I don’t miss dealing with heaping piles of recycling. I also don’t like mucking about with the physical paper itself.
When the National Post publishes articles like this one (thanks David Eaves). It really cements some journalists as ignorant blowhards with an incumberance of verbiage and a dearth of knowledge and capacity. They still haven’t figured out that their job is easy, that’s why everyone is doing it.
I think people tend to forget that newspapers are assembled by former journalism students, not domain experts. People writing in papers are not exactly the brilliantly intelligent geniuses who go off and discover DNA, invent the world wide web or micro-loans - they write stories about stuff they saw or stuff other people saw. Hardly the premise for expert analysis. How else could one explain the painful factual errors? The jaw-dropping oversimplifications, or glibness toward a force that will put every self-important key-puncher out of a job in no time flat? Either they are insane, stupid, or liars. They can pick, I’d believe any of the three.
Given that their job is to report on things it’s amazing how poorly they perform even that function - so poorly in fact, that readers are willing to forgo institutional authority to get the news they want rather than what some decrepit out-of-touch editor thinks we need to hear.
The pathetic ego-stroking exercises like the one in the National Post really drive home the fact that journalists actually think they’re smarter than the rest of us - when the simple fact is that journalists are at best as smart as you and me and probably less smart (after all, they’re clinging to a dying business model).
“the market place of ideas is going to be more superficial and unedifying than it already is.”
This is the kind of remark that would get one’s ass kicked in highschool, and for good reason. It’s astonishingly arrogant to suggest that newspapers stand between the world and some alarmist mythology of superficiality. Newspapers are the primary culprits of this insertion of idiocy - how else can you explain Margaret Wente?
Here’s the kicker, the evidence Kay cites in support of the web is regarding investigative journalism - which is the one part of newspapers not under threat. He also talks about resource investment; the whole point of citizens journalism is that they don’t need to invest resources - everything is cheap; that’s how it wins.
Who will be firmly unemployed by the blogosphere? Jonathan Kay and people like him - under-informed op-ed writers who think they’re smarter than their readers. Kay has demonstrated himself incapable of providing sound evidence for his argument, misinterpreting the reality of subject on which he is opining and capping off his demonstration of ignorance with a display of arrogance that puts mine to shame.
People like Kay are killing newspapers faster than the blogosphere - alienating audiences by insulting them is hardly a way to win their loyalty.