“Thanks to Google, we can “know” fabulous amounts more than our ancestors did – yet sometimes all that does is make us quicker to fall for toxic fallacies.”

You fell for a toxic fallacy in old media. That’s what Tim was pointing out. There’s lots of research out there on how people use the internet. Little of it makes it into newspapers. A lot of it is published on the web, sometimes even in blogs (11D, Crooked Timber both have had interesting things to say about what people do with blogs for example and much of it is counter-intuitive, and those research claims were quite limited).

Or let’s do this another way. Old print media gave up the ghost on Civil Rights in 1877, or in some cases as late as 1896, and it stayed abandoned until the 1950s when a new media broke the wall of silence and racism and started showing images that brought the realities of the South the nation. Despite the fact that white Southerners complained loudly that the new medium -television- distorted the truth through it’s emphasis on images, privileged emotion over reason, and didn’t capture the depth and complexity of the situation, the introduction of television moved Civil Rights forward in ways newspapers hadn’t and wouldn’t because “nobody was interested in those stories.”

The internet has done that for all kinds of reporting. I don’t know whether to feel sad or happy that some of the best reporting on the Iraq war was organized by a bunch of amateurs on a college campus that doesn’t even have a journalism program. What Tim is lamenting is the fact that what passes for in-depth reporting (ie: this protracted series in the NYT on how technology is making us stoopid and your echo chamber commentary) is what gives old media a bad name when it could and should do so much better.

If you’re busier with trying to get NewsWorks established, then stick to that. If NewsWorks turns out to be a good solution to the problem of how to keep reportage alive in the new media environment, then I’ll be first to cheer you on. I hope you find a way to leverage what’s already out there into something new rather than building a big, empty house which sits in lonesome cyberspatial splendor, which is so far closer to the pattern of established media attempts to participate in digital projects.

I’m not sure why you think checking with you in advance would change anything about the fact that you took airtime to deliver a banal commentary on information technology. All I’d know then is that you’re busy: it doesn’t make the commentary itself any better.

If you are concerned about length, think more carefully about what that concern implies. If you have very little space, focus on a single interesting, provocative or original thought. Or use digital space and radio space differently: a short on-the-air comment that links to a more in-depth, fully developed commentary. Or to some kind of forum or discussion that you’re trying to encourage or provoke. There are good models for that kind of approach out there already.

Allow me to point out mildly, Tim, that you devoted about five times as many words to bashing this piece for not saying what you wanted it to as are alloted to such a radio commentary.

And you rather missed the point of the NYT piece which was the jumping off point.

Which leads you to make all kinds of unkind and untrue assumptions about the stance I was taking – creating a very familiar old media straw man you could bash.

I probably didn’t take as much time as I could have to hone that piece into something of which you’d approve – in part because I spend 95 percent of my work week these days inventing a new Web presence for WHYY which aims to be one of the first true marriages of professional journalism and community production of news and commentary.

That’s where the future is headed – and I’m trying to help build it on a firmer basis than the nonsensical notion that a thousand amateurs banging away in independent inexperience would somehow magically reproduce the kind of reporting that, say, Craig McCoy and Joe Tanfani of the Inquirer have done to expose the rot of public corruption in Philadelphia, or a few years back, that the Inquirer Washington bureau did to expose the lies and distortions of intelligence that undergirded the Iraq war.

Of course, if you’d called me or written me – the kind of thing a real journalist might do before committing nastily critical opinions to public view – we could have had a nice chat about all this – and you’d have a much better sense of who I am, instead of a convenient stand-in for a favorite target.

The email is csatullo@whyy.org. Be happy to talk anytime. Maybe you’d like to contribute to the new site.

Chris

1. As it continues to get easier and easier to publish fiction, we will get an astounding abundance of new stuff to read. The absolute quantity of “good stuff” to read will increase, though the amount of “bad stuff” will of course increase faster.

2. At the same time, fiction-writing will disappear as a paid career. All the dithering and soul-searching about how to make money off of ebooks, etc. is a waste of time. When the smoke clears, only technical writers and other highly specialized writers will actually make money directly from their writing.

3. You will start to see fiction tailored very tightly to very small groups. People will be writing novel-length works not for money, but to impress small audiences of one or ten or maybe a few hundred people. These works will get more self-referential and more impenetrable to outsiders.

4. For mass audiences, novel-writing will become more of a gentleperson’s pursuit. When the professional class of writers goes extinct, wealthy people will fill that niche: the people who are able to write full time, and the people who will have the best hope at getting their work out to a large audience.

This means that in lists of the most popular books, we’ll actually see an *increasing* emphasis on works that reflect the concerns and worldview of the well-to-do. Meanwhile, down in the depths, fiction will get increasingly fungal and weird.

Though I could see an NPR station or local paper arguing that some kind of community opinion writer is a good way to connect to their community, a cheaper kind of localism than actual reportage. But then you have to find someone who has a feel for locality, and what most of them instead go for is a completely generic pundit who isn’t good enough even for what passes for big-leagues punditry and reinforces the idea that the local scene is just a bush-league New York or Washington or San Francisco. And therefore that the local paper or the local radio station or anything local is dispensible.

I had an epiphany recently (surely not original, but I hadn’t heard anyone say it) that this odd decision almost certainly reflected journalism’s internal heirarchy, rather than the actual value of what traditional media produces. Columnists and opinionistas are often ex-reporters or ex-editors. They’ve done their time doing the nitty-gritty work, and have gathered a lot of valuable information and insight that make them qualified for the job of holding forth with their opinions on things. Being a columnist is a pretty posh gig — it sure beats chasing down sources on the phone or going to city council meetings — and it’s a promotion from day-to-day journalism. They’re almost certainly paid more than their mere mortal reporter co-workers, and thus people in the business see them as more valuable — and therefore assumed that readers would pay good money for access to them.

But of course this is nonsense. Any asshole on the Internet can be David Brooks, or Maureen Dowd — or at least can be 80 percent as good as them, which works out fine since they’ll be infinitely cheaper. (I would argue that any asshole on the Internet can actually be 150 percent as good as Tom Friedman, but I digress.) And so the Times was charging for the one thing that the Internet has free and unlimited amounts (other people’s reporting digested and presented as opinion) while giving away the sort of dogged, professional, expensive reporting that people in their pajamas can’t or won’t do.

Anyway, my point is: why do professional journalistic organizations even bother with opinion pieces any more? If they really need them, they should pay some blogger a pittance to repurpose them, then redirect that money to actual journalism.