Newspaperless news
By Bill Kraus
A couple of cyber-spaceheads reacted to me and my recent blog post lamenting the decline of the print press generally and the loss of hundreds of reporters specifically.
My contention was that reporters are the root source of information in this society and on this planet. Without reporters, I thought but didn’t say, the promulgators of blogs (such as this one), the producers of television news, and radio programmers everywhere would dry up and blow away for lack of raw material.
Spacehead number one jumped to the defense of two of major league bloggers (Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington) and relegated me and all like me to the trash bin of ancient history. To wit:
“Drudge and HuffPo are big enough that people send them information or they discover it through their networks. Both..have broken news stories that newspapers later picked up. To say that [they] are just regurgitating what is in the newspapers is silly. I even break stories on this site from time to time. Anyone who has a network can do it and at the end of the day, the only difference between newspapers and bloggers is that newspapers have paid staff, but that will change.”
I guess this is responsive even though it doesn’t seem to me to address the question of the huge numbers of reporters and the discipline that they bring (or should bring or do bring before some editor screws it up) to their profession. His concluding paragraph goes from disagreeing to insulting.
“The main reason why newspapers will never die,” he says, “is that many people in this generation are attached to them. When the new generation which is not accustomed to reading newspapers takes over, newspapers will no longer be necessary.”
So the organized collection and dispensing of information hangs by a thin thread: us geezers.
Spacehead number two, who I know and who in response to my direct question “Where do you get your information?” told me “by osmosis,” seems to me to head off into non sequitur land with this:
“It will be a positive change to have television without news networks to drown us in all the negativity of the world. They thrive on things like murder, rape, and natural disasters for ratings. Sure there are a few noble journalists out there, those who are driven by an internal passion to share information with the world. Maybe this change will cut out the fat and eliminate all those journalists who are only motivated by money and numbers. Those journalists who are deeply motivated will find a way to do their job whether there is a guaranteed paycheck or not.”
Really?
Until and unless someone shows me how the Internet, with its amazing plethora of information, is something more than a resource, I will continue to think of it as an infinite tower of Babel instead of as a replacement for the tradition and traditional role of journalism.
It’s paradoxical but possible that this age of massive overcommunication may be courting knownothingness. Unless my two critics are right, of course. Or, Heaven forbid, that my old fogie peer group and I are behind the curve and over the hill.