Summary
The Tribune Company, the grasping conglomerate owner that strangled the Los Angeles Times, has been entertaining a buyout offer from an "angel," Chicago real estate megabillionaire Sam Zell, who's on record saying "there is no difference" between running a newspaper and managing any other for-profit business. If that isn't irony enough, Zell's nickname is "The Grave Dancer," for his ability to spot moribund properties and exploit them profitably. How I'd relish the opportunity to lecture him on the difference between owning a newspaper and owning a malL [John Carroll] argues that these corporate leviathans are "genuinely perplexed" by journalists-"people in their midst who do not feel beholden, first and foremost to the shareholder. What makes these people tick, they wonder. The job of any employee, as they see it is to produce a good financial result not to indulge in some dreamy form of do-gooding at company expense. ... Our corporate superiors regard our beliefs as quaint wasteful and increasingly tiresome." If we believe Carroll, who ought to know, nothing we ever held sacred is safe from jungle capitalism and its harsh ideology, as we might have guessed from the awful mess the free market has made of American health care. Citing Carroll and Washington Post owner Donald Graham as his star witnesses, [Russell Baker] comes to the radical conclusion that "free-market capitalism doesn't really work very well in the newspaper business, and if rigorously applied, tends to destroy it."
I know they're easy to offend and hard to pacify, but considering my grim situation-admittedly obsolete, on the waiting list for a corner room at "At -30-"-I hope they'll hear me out on the subject of professionalism. I took the trouble to get a master's degree in journalism, mough I always questioned whether it ought to be an academic discipline. I've practiced the trade in one form or another for most of 40 years. To claim that I can be replaced by anyone with an Apple and an attitude is inherently insulting, is it not? It implies what you might be hesitant to imply about any other profession, that what I know is worthless. No doubt the news trade's easier to master man astrophysics or neurosurgery; but you're naive and arrogant if you imagine that nothing is lost when volunteers take up our jobs. (I use "volunteer" because "amateur" and "hobbyist"are pejorative and provocative.)The Internet tends to present all 40,000 stories and let die bewildered consumer sort them out That's free speech, absolutely. Journalism, not necessarily. I'm inclined to admire the open-mic populism of what they call "the blogosphere." Citizen initiative is a rare and precious resource. But "blog eat blog," a free-for-all that shares DNA with the "I'm Right she's Left, we're both furious" dogfights that trivialize TV news shows, will never be the salvation of the First Amendment "And the center is not much in evidence," one aide to a presidential candidate reminded me. Some observers object more strenuously. A much-quoted book of late (much quoted, no doubt, by working journalists) is The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen. According to Keen, a disenchanted technocrat from Silicon Valley, the Internet "is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent" The celebrated British novelist Ian McEwan, noting the current purge of newspaper book reviewers, concurred. "Publishers seem to be very keyed up to embrace the Internet," said McEwan, "but I don't have much time for the kind of site where readers do all the reviewing. Reviewing takes expertise, wisdom and judgment. I am not much fond of the notion that anyone's view is as good as anyone else's."See the full content of this document
Extract
Stop the Presses
Two friends from different solar systems, a Manhattan litigator and a Kentucky novelist, sent me home-burned CDs that included the same song, "James River Blues" by the Old Crow Medicine Show. A boatman's lament from the time when railroads replaced the packet boats on Virginia's lames River, it's a sad song about the end of an era, a trade and a way of life. It made me think of the John Henry steel-drivin' songs ("Lawd, I'll die with a hammer in my hand''), and I realized that a lot of our American folklore and folk music, from Paul Bunyan and his blue ox to the cowboy myth that never seems to die, was inspired by a common nostalgia for what the workmen did, and will never do again.
"Ill become a memory? sings the sorrowful boatman. Finding "James River Blues" on both of these CDs struck me as an omen, at a time when my own imperiled profession seems to be going the way of the riverboatman, the lumberjack and "the Old Lamplighter of long, long ago."Years ago when I was a columnist for The Buffalo News, a droll colleague named Ray Hill invented a nursing home for decrepit reporters that bore the name "At -30-." (...See the full content of this document
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