Comments on: A Rose By Any Other Name

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 18 May 2007 05:41:58 +0000

I use the BBC World Service, Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune. etc. for the outside world, but they can’t tell me about the county commission. You can’t do local reporting at a distance, and local reporting is what sells local newspapers.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Fri, 18 May 2007 05:22:23 +0000

i'd kind of like to replace my local newspaper, but i agree with you, i'd like to have a local paper. a better one than the one i have would be nice. i do like having the news from elsewhere too though. hello, my name is hipparchia, and i'm a news junkie. back when the internet was just a gleam in al gore's eye, i subscribed to four [not a typo] newspapers, three from around the state and one "big" one. the boston globe was my favorite [it carried calvin and hobbes], but one or two years there, i got the washington dc paper instead. i sort of knew that about the depression, but had forgotten it. thanks for the reminder.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:30:02 +0000

Well, the medium is plastic and you can write a new version if you wish, but the point is made.

I don’t want to replace my local newspaper, I want my local newspaper to print enough local news to make it worth buying. I don’t want to read printed versions of wire service stories when we have had a local wildfire, I want to know about the wildfire.

I’m not interested in what people are doing in Miami, Atlanta, or wherever the conglomerate headquarters is located, I want to know what local people are doing. Local news is the saving grace of newspapers, and it gets ignored as budgets for local reporting are cut.

I don’t expect perfection, but if a mistake is made, correct it and move on, don’t waste time and paper complaining that people noticed the mistake.

Most people don’t know that it was years before newspapers admitted there was a Depression. Until the draft for World War II, a lot of people thought the problem was local. Reading old newspapers from that era is amazing – there was a conscious effort not to report malnutrition as a cause of death. Newspapers were openly partisan, but you knew that and could adjust for it.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Fri, 18 May 2007 01:51:53 +0000

ack. i could have written that better. good thing i’m only a blogger.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Fri, 18 May 2007 01:50:27 +0000

you didn’t get the memo? ’twas the evil blogosphere that invented pseudonyms, sock puppetry, uncivil discourse, and anonymous death threats. everyone knows that!

this citizen journalism stuff is great: fact-checking made easy [by google, et al] and fact-spreading made easy [via the social networking of blogging].

of course good journalism can include blatant and partisan opining, alongside straight reporting. nothing wrong with that. nothing wrong with including entertainment either. i’m all for funny pages in the newspaper, saturday morning cartoons on tv, and a good juicy spy story or murder mystery for beach reading, or taking in yet another star wars movie.

increasingly, though, the corporate-owned media conglomerates have put their efforts into squeezing out more and more dollars for themselves, instead of putting out information [and even entertainment] for us. probably citizen journalism was going to rise up anyway, but “real” journalists didn’t do themselves any favors by slacking off on real and responsible journalism, nor are they doing themselves any favors by whining about getting caught out, caught up to, and in some cases, passed by bloggers.