Super interessant artikel i The New Yorker om blogging:
Den handler blandt andet om The Tatler, The Post Boy, The Medley, and The British Apollo. Og nej, det er ikke blogs men 300 år gamle pamfletter, der i deres udtryk og deres forfatteres virke var datidens blogs.
Artiklens forfatter NICHOLAS LEMANN (Lemann er the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University) hævder endda, at deres indflydelse var langt større end nogen nulevende bloggers.
Han hakker ret kraftigt på blogosfæren, men med underbyggende argumenter. Og så mener han interessant nok, at de sande borgerjournalister ikke er de mange politiske bloggere, men folk der tog sagen i egen hånd under fx. Katarina katastrofen i New Orleans, hvor de traditionelle medier ikke længere virkede eller ikke havde adgang til området.
Og det kan han jo have ret i. Her er klassisk journalistik på pletten. Ikke bare tankespind bag skrivebordet på bekostning af de etablerede medier.
So far so good - så giver Lemann eksempler fra borgermedier. Og de eksempler er værre end den værste lokalsprøjte. Måske har han fundet de værste. Svært at sige, men eksemplerne er i sandhed jammerlige.
Konklusionen er:
Journalism is not in a period of maximal self-confidence right now, and the Internet’s cheerleaders are practically laboratory specimens of maximal self-confidence. They have got the rhetorical upper hand; traditional journalists answering their challenges often sound either clueless or cowed and apologetic. As of now, though, there is not much relation between claims for the possibilities inherent in journalist-free journalism and what the people engaged in that pursuit are actually producing. As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.
Læs selv hele artiklen. Den er god.
The New Yorker: Fact:
“AMATEUR HOUR
Journalism without journalists.
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
Issue of 2006-08-07
Posted 2006-07-31
On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian Internet journalism, according to those wh produce manifestos on its behalf, represents world-historical development—not so muc because of the expressive power of the ne medium as because of its accessibility t producers and consumers. That permits it t break the long-standing choke hold on publi information and discussion that the traditiona media—usually known, when this argument i made, as ‘gatekeepers’ or ‘the priesthood’—have supposedly been able to maintain up t now. ‘Millions of Americans who were once i awe of the punditocracy now realize tha anyone can do this stuff—and that man unknowns can do it better than the lords of th profession,’ Glenn Reynolds, a University o Tennessee law professor who operates one o the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new bo”
(Via The New Yorker.)