On Scripting News, David Winer says he’s getting a lot of “pushback” for the last sentence of his recent article, The Web is a Writing Environment. Of course once you read the last sentence, it is not too hard to figure out why,
What’s said outside the barriers is already more interesting. Eventually we will shed our need for approval from the brand names of journalism. Today they look for teddy bears and warm-fuzzies, the cute stories that mask the real one — writers who work for others have less integrity to offer than those who do it for love.
Ugh. I think there is a lot wrong with contemporary journalism. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that journalists and news organizations don’t do a very good job of living up to their own claimed ideals of objectivity and (especially) fact checking.
But simply taking the money issue out of the equation doesn’t necessarily improve the situation either. In fact the worst possible form of journalism is practiced by those small circle of people that I know and that you probably know as well who, out of nothing but the purest motivations, regularly forward e-mails filled with urban legends and myths that have found new lives on the Internet.
A friend of mine has a basic worldview that I don’t necessarily subscribe to, but which sometimes seems a lot more accurate than a lot of other efforts to describe the world that I’ve seen. His philosophy is this: People Are Stupid. A more complicated version might be: People Are Credulous.
One of the (many) things that continues to amaze me, for example, is the large number of people I know and respect who take psychics seriously. And it’s not just my friends and associates — look at the enormous popularity of the SciFi Channel’s “Crossing Over With John Edwards.”
For those of you who haven’t seen or heard about it, Edwards claims he can communicate with the dead. Basically he’s another fraud using classic cold reading techniques, judicious editing, and other techniques to make it seem like he’s accessing knowledge known only to audience members.
The first time I saw a SciFi channel promo for the show, I was contemplating canceling my subscription to the channel but figured the show would never be a hit — the fakery here is obvious, I thought. But obviously not as the show is so successful it’s rumored to be on the verge of jumping to a major network.
I’m not so sure how giving those true believers and fans of such a show will improve the integrity of journalism (in fact, I suspect the resulting web sites would be used as confirming evidence by print media of the problems with disintermediated journalism).
In this respect, easy to use web tools such as Winer’s Manila or Blogger or the Conversant software that powers this site is transformative only in the way that PageMaker and WordPerfect were transformative. All three forms of software made it easier than ever for people to produce professional looking documents in a variety of media. They did (and do) nothing, however, to prevent the resulting product from being crap.