Two essays appeared last week, each addressing changes in the media landscape, each presenting a pragmatic kind of optimism present. And yet one sustains its mood and manages to infect the reader with its optimism; the other, unfortunately, is marred by a strange shift into meanspiritedness that
First: Robert Christgau on the end of Blender. (Douglas Wolk has thoughts on the same topic that are also worth reading.) And via musing on the end of Blender, we get a capsule history of music magazines in the last decade: editorial politics, histories of criticism, and shifting word counts abound. It’s eloquently done, and leaves you thinking that, hey, most things might turn out okay.
Second, Mark Morford on assorted future-of-newspapers pieces. Morford’s piece is an attempt to digest multiple theories of where newspapers are going, and the fact that he openly bristles at the bizarre quasi-joy some seem to be taking in watching an industry contort is welcome. And his analysis seems solid — there’s a good mixture of the theoretical and a sort of ground-level practicality, a solid knowledge of how the industry works.
But there’s one particular section of his that, I suspect, may well have caused a good chunk of the people who read this who’d be inclined to support his argument to shake their heads and walk away, and it’s this one:
Look, I’m all for media upheaval and revolution. I’m all for seeing what will emerge from the ashes of print, should it die out completely. But there’s a reason the traditional newsroom model has lasted 150 years, that professional journalism is still considered so vital to a healthy democracy, that it’s still a profession requiring years of training and education, and not just a casual hobby you engage in when you’re a little drunk and you’ve read a few McLuhan books and you don’t get enough sex so hey, might as well mosey over to that Planning Commission meeting and scribble some notes.
Specifically — I probably don’t need to say this — it’s the “casual hobby” bit, which very nearly made me abandon the reading of Morford’s piece. Morford makes a fine argument about the reputations and resources of, say, the New York Times — and then completely undermines his credibility by deciding he’s going to throw in some random blogger stereotypes. (I guess “hard-drinking and undersexed” is a step up from “pajamas-wearing basement-dwellers,” but not by much.) And it’s a shame, because the points and critiques he’s making are largely sensible and worthwhile. But it’s also hard to read this and wonder whether its author threw out a lot of his essay’s appeal in order to pick a relatively random fight.