Reaction
A blogger praises that crazy idea of words printed on dead trees.
Bloggers, reporters ... the robot journalists are gonna kill us all anyway.
In case you were one of those people living in the candy palace of delusion that holds that blogs will sweep in to save journalism from the not-so-slow death of print, well, here’s a blogger with a bone to pick.
CityLife contributor and blogger Josh Ellis has a thoughtful post on his site Zenarchery titled, “What Newspapers Are For.” It’s a reax to another piece in which new media hypester Seth Godin, well, builds himself a nice li’l candy palace of delusion about blogs and other unpaid forms of pajama journalism handily picking up where traditional journalism drops off (with Seussy, nonsensical guff such as, “The magic of the web … is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical. It’s like 6 divided by zero. Infinity.”)
A snip from Ellis’ take on this crazy talk:
What newspapers have that blogs don’t — and can’t, and won’t for the foreseeable future — is full-time staff, who are paid a (presumably) living wage to do the kind of in-depth work that blogs don’t, can’t, and won’t for the foreseeable future. A staff writer can spend the hours in the library or the paper’s morgue and on the street interviewing sources, doing interviews and getting background.
Newspapers also still provide identity and legitimacy functions for journalists, particularly in the world of politics. Don’t believe me? Try to get White House press credentials for your blog. Call up your Senator and ask their press secretary to provide you with background and an official statement for a blog post you’re doing.
Read the full post here.
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