Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Gene Weingarten strikes back for all the "old-timers"

This column from Gene Weingarten pretty well sums up my feelings about what is going on in journalism today.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The goal of Mlive and other digital news organizations today is to "engage the community" or have "a conversation" about the topics of the day.

Getting 10 responses to a post on your website is more important than writing about important issues affecting the community. So we get all kinds of stories asking for your opinion on the weather or your favorite flavor of ice cream.

The end result is that you cater to the few dozen posters who have nothing better to do than exchange inane comments.

21 March, 2012 16:34
Anonymous said...

We've all gotten letters or phone calls from the cranks out there as well as the occasional ones that pleasantly surprised us by offering an intelligent perspective that we hadn't thought of yet in covering an issue.

I like to think that we weighed what people told or vented to us accordingly. Reader comments posted online should be treated the same way.

The problem is that too many editors and publishers now treat reader comments as gospel and think that the ill-informed opinion of some dip shit is plenty to base a story on.

Look at some of the crap on Mlive lately: "Readers debate blah, blah, blah, blah, blah ...." And the stuff is typically based on the most inane comments - which maybe goes to how well we do in informing our readers - and written in a way that the thoughts of the few who choose to spread their drivel online somehow reflects the views of the many.

Overall, given the way editors and publisher treat their readers like such dupes, it's no wonder that so many people hate us these days.

21 March, 2012 18:51

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