PressEthic

In this week’s Time Magazine, Michael Kinsley offers his analysis of the newspaper’s survival struggle against the impossibly convenient and accessible internet world. Kinsley’s largest concerns stem from financial troubles in newspaper offices, digital classified ads, and bloggers Kinsley refers to as “wannabes.”

Perhaps the most jarring part of his article is his treatment of the latter category:

“…there is blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports,” he states in his lead paragraph.

Later, he goes on to describe a reader’s choice between digital and print media in rather bold terms:

“You can sit down at your laptop and enjoy that same newspaper or any other newspaper in the world. Or you can skip the newspapers and go to some site that makes the news more entertaining or politically simpatico. And where do these wannabes get most of their information? From newspapers, of course.”

It’s a pity, however, that Kinsley does not provide us with more specific examples or descriptions of these said “wannabes.” As someone desperate for journalistic guidance, I am left unsatisfied.

Growing up in a small, Scandinavian country with a population roughly 60% of New York City’s, I had a choice of two evening news programs and a handful of newspapers (with one indisputably emerging as the dominant one). As a result, the endless plethora of news sources in the US, each with their eagerly talking heads, has proven to be a difficult phenomenon to adjust to. As the number and exposure of internet bloggers has grown, so has my confusion.

As a new immigrant, it had been hard enough to choose which high-profile American news outlet to trust; now I am forced to do so all over again, with a selection of cyberspace voices that appears to grow exponentially each time I open my internet browser.

Thus, I count on knowledgeable, established journalists like Kinsley to point me in the right direction. When these individuals fail to back up their statements, I find myself back at square one. I may be intrigued when Kinsley mentions an “acned 12-year-old in his parents’ basement recycling rumors from the Internet echo chamber,” but these generalizations do little to help me understand the jumbled, eclectic media world. I can only imagine how an average reader, not studying journalism at an elite university, must feel.

Towards the end of his piece, Kinsley comes closer to offering us a constructive opinion:

“The “me to you” model of news gathering—a professional reporter, attuned to the fine distinctions between “off the record” and “deep background,” prizing factual accuracy in the narrowest sense—may well give way to some kind of “us to us” communitarian arrangement of the sort that thrives on the Internet. But there is room between the New York Times and myleftarmpit.com for new forms that liberate journalism from its encrusted conceits while preserving its standards, like accuracy.”

Kinsley’s anger—and his undoubtedly inspiring vision—must have been sparked by something or someone. What he needs to do now is direct our attention to them.

Kinsley's article