JAY. AGAIN

Sometimes I think I should give up blogging and just turn this site into a permanent link to Jay Rosen's PressThink.

His latest piece, The Coming Apart of An Ordered World: Bloggers Notebook, Election Eve, is another in his long list of thought-provoking essays about the state of the media, the reality of the present and the promise for the future.

Cutting right to the chase of his latest:

About the performance of journalists in 2004 it will be asked, post-election: How good a job did the press do? But Big Journalism was in a different situation in politics and the world during this campaign. The post-mortems should be about that. Also: will the press even have this job in 08?

About the situation journalism find itself in, I still feel there is too much to say-- too many changes and disruptions. We understand very little of it. Much more will be mapped out after the election drama is over, and there's a chance to step back. Maybe now, in the final days of our ignorance about who the next President will be, there are a few things that will never be clearer:

• The declining cost for like minded people to find each other, get together, and independently act was a major factor in this campaign.
• All around the scene in politics, in media, and in matters of interpretation, we find fallen barriers to entry.
• Gatekeepers who can keep information out of circulation no longer exist, but the attitudes of those who once swung the gates-- they still exist.

Thus, Doug McGill, former NYT reporter is on to something big: "we are at sea because our Grand Old Professional Code is falling to pieces."

As always, Rosen's afterthoughts and the comments from his readers add to the ongoing discussion about the beast that is journalism.
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LOVE IS IN THE AIR

From unmediated.org: videophone dating.
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GREAT HEADLINE WRITING

From today's NY Times: Politics makes estranged bedfellows.
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MORE GREAT PHOTOGRAPHY

I've had this bookmarked for a while and had forgotten to pass it along. VII Photo Agency represents some mighty fine photojournalists, including Christopher Morris, James Natchwey and Lauren Greenfield, and its web site is outstanding.

Like other agencies, the site features bios and portfolios of its members work, but it goes beyond that, with a large number of photo stories. Right now, the front page features Morris on American politics, Gary Knight's photos from Angkor What, Greenfield's feature on Lipstick Lesbians and more. There's also a gallery, archive and more features. Go see.
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A NOVEL A MONTH

Here's an interesting way to spend November: writing a 50,000 word novel. Last year, 25,000 people signed up for National Novel Writing Month and more than 3,500 of them made it to the finish line.

There's no grand prize, only the satisfaction of having done it. From the web site:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and -- when the thing is done -- the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

SOURCE: PJNet Today.
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BIG MEDIA LOSES

Ira Basen, longtime CBCer, has declared the loser of the U.S. presidential campaign: big media.

In a CBC News Viewpoint published Saturday, Basen picks up on some of the now familiar laments about what's happened to mainstream media:

Signs of trouble are not hard to find. A recent survey of registered voters undertaken by the Pew Research Center found that only a narrow majority of respondents (54 per cent) were prepared to give the press a favourable grade on its overall campaign coverage. And the discontent within Big Media itself is even more pervasive. The Committee of Concerned Journalists surveyed 500 of their members in mid-October, and reported that nearly 70 per cent graded their campaign coverage a C, D or F.

Basen traces the media's problems back to its too-compliant response to the White House in the wake of Sept.11, 2001 and then through a nasty election campaign where "he said/she said" journalism has become "he spun/she spun."

in a political realm so infused by "spin" from all sides, the traditional he said/she said reportorial paradigm seems increasingly anachronistic and counter-productive. It leads not to truth, but to confusion and obfuscation.

Basen says the big winners in the current U.S. election are bloggers, because they've thrown out the media's insistence on neutrality and added a "we say" to the "he said/she said." (I'll go a step further: bloggers are much more entertaining than most mainstream media reading and they go much, much further in deconstructing the news they present.)

Basen concludes his piece with the new conventional wisdom that mainstream media has to share the stage with Blog World now and that election coverage will never be the same. That seems to be the emerging conventional wisdom, but I wonder.

Would the emergence of the blogs and the decline of respect for mainstream media have happened as rapidly as it did had it not been for how bitterly divided Americans are and how intense their election has been? In a less heated election season, would bloggers matter as much?

UPDATE: Don Button, a very smart friend of mine and a keen observer of media, responds to Basen's contention that people are drifting away from media based on "the editorial bias of its chosen media."

He should have thought that through. Assumes people had drifted away from media choice based on bias. Maybe they had — but he doesn't substantiate.

And suggestion that FOX is convincing people to vote for Bush is other side of his own argument. It's like saying ESPN converts people to sports fans because such a high % of it's viewers are sports fans.

WRITERS SPEAK

According to the the Literary Saloon, the Paris Review will put all of its full-length interviews with authors online beginning Nov. 10.

That's a whole lot of interviews (the Paris Review has been around since 1953) and a whole lot of authors ranging from Robert Frost in the first issue to Haruki Murakami in the latest issue. A great resource for those who love the written word.
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