Here’s a fine piece on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog. I am sure it resonated with many.
It’s the future of journalism, already here.
Richard Sine’s recent Close the J-Schools piece struck a chord with me. I used to hang around a school of journalism when I was a graduate student. I had a friend who taught there with whom I published a newsletter. He was unrelentingly funny about the students. He taught them graphics. Whatever skepticism I might have had about teaching journalism in a university I was willing to suspend — on his account — because he was old-school. First, educated. Second, experienced. He was a fund of funny stories, as I’m sure all good journalists are, with their repertoire of everything that’s not fit to print. And his speech was colourful, enough that I should have written down some of his choicer aphorisms. He was, of course, a liberal. A deep, dyed in the wool, ferocious liberal, in the finest sense of the word. I know few Americans to whom Barack Obama’s election would have mattered as much.
All his students wanted was to get well-paid jobs. He wanted them to make a difference, or at least to give a damn. He told me once about a pretty girl who sat on his desk and said she’d do anything for a good grade. Anything. Anything at all. He leaned over and said in a whisper
Would you work?
He wasn’t an American Claud Cockburn (whose I Claud: Memoris of Subversive is a laugh-out-loud funny memoir of the profession) but his sympathies with the oppressed were similar and I’d rather have had a pint with him than the bosses in sharp suits with Ph.Ds. in journalism (only in America). He was, after all, online and futzing with computers years and years ahead of them.
The name Sullivan comes from Irish for one eye (suil amháin). His impaired vision permitted him to support the invasion of Iraq, but he has made up for it since in ways the mainstream media have not.
I enjoy Sullivan for his intelligence, articulacy, his passion — as do others. However, I also rather like that he is in some way a voice from the rest of the world who is listened to in America.
He has certainly worked for his success. But his audience has helped, as he acknowledges. What his readership sends him by way of links on a daily basis (thousands) must rival what entire newsrooms have filtered not that long ago.
It has certainly changed how I consume news. I rely more and more on links from places like the Huffington Post and from friends. In an ideal future I’d get my news on a Kindle or Crunchpad and I could see stories bookmarked by people whose bookmarks interest me — and, to some extent, those to whom I feel antipathy, so I can keep an eye on the arguments.
We have almost given up the Sunday Times.
It arrives with the faithful now and then after church.
I thought we’d given this up?
I say, shaking my head. Then I read the only thing worth reading: Andrew Sullivan’s column.
I find the rest of it increasingly unreadable. Too much old news, recycled for those who are not online, or abbreviated for those with diminished attention spans. And too many of the world’s most boring journalists writing about themselves.
It’s a good magazine this week.
was the verdict when I inquired if there was anything I should read. Ouch. This is not on the web. A glance at the cover revealed…. A.A. Gill. Quelle surprise.
Boris Johnson, Lord Mayor London, was in a spot of bother this week for dismissing as chicken feed his salary of £250,000 a year for writing a column for The Telegraph. That it’s rather less than A.A. Gill is paid my have helped him put his foot it in.
Imagine if Andew and Boris and AA and other elite purveyors of the finest words formed an agency, as the finest photographers did with Magnum…
It’s a slightly horrible idea. But then so is News International.
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