Here's an interesting website. In 2002, a man named Russ Kick started a site called The Memory Hole -- dedicated to "rescuing knowledge and freeing information." A more bare-bones rendition of William Bastone's The Smoking Gun, the Memory Hole is an information aggregation site that catalogs "lost" information -- government files, corporate memos, congressional testimonies, and police reports for the public record. According to Kick, the lone editor and publisher for the site, it "exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known."
Traditional journalists (or TJs, as I call them) argue that the digital age's effects on the mainstream is the decline of actual reporting. I’d argue otherwise. With more information available online, journalists like Kick probably don’t even have to leave the house to break news -- and shouldn’t make their work any less credible. The decline of actual reporting isn’t a phenomenon synonymous with the internet -- it’s a problem that has persisted with all forms of media. The information is out there, and maybe TJs should work a little bit more on cleaning up their own house.
John (not verified) @ Wed, 03/22/2006 - 5:45pm
That Helen Thomas article goes a long way to proving your point. How can TJs really believe that blogs, which monitor the news to assure its technical accuracy, do a disservice to honest reporting? It sounds to me like doctors who complain about the threat of malpractice lawsuits: if you don't screw up, it won't be a problem. Howard Kurtz seems like a real "TJ Max," if you know what I mean.