The Future

I was waiting for this (scroll down to the letter from Newton, MA):
Charles P. Pierce's evisceration of Daily Kos founder and Brave New World deity Markos Moulitsas. I believe the term of art is pwned!
In their weblog dialogue lie some lessons about the demise of the newspaper and the rise of whatever is, or isn't, replacing it. With apologies to Pierce...
Lesson the First: In any battle of wits with Mr. Pierce, we are, all of us, poorly armed.
Lesson the Second: The growth of this newfangled Internet, which is all in all a great thing (thank you, Al Gore!), inevitably leads to old-fashioned hubris. Last week, Kos drank deeply from a pixelated goblet of self-regard, and then proceeded to vomit all over the crumbling newspaper industry, a Caligula-esque display of blogo-triumphalism. Kos speaks to us in a parable:

At one of those conferences, however, a nice editor approached me. He had tracked the growth patterns of this site and was wondering what he could do to help his mid-sized newspaper become better acclimated to the web.My answer then, same as it would be now, was to embrace the audience and make them feel like part of the endeavor, create tools that would allow greater engagement and discussion between editors, writers, and readers. As a first step, why not add comments to your stories?
The editor sighed. You see, he told me, they had tried that already. The reporters hated it of course, since I doubt I've met a more thin-skinned group of people in my life than beat reporters. They're expected to become instant experts on any number of issues on a day-to-day basis, so they're touchy when they screw up, which is often. But the experiment in user feedback persisted until the newspaper's "star columnist" stormed into the editor's office one day.

The columnist in the parable demanded the "graffiti" come down or he would quit. The newspaper caved and took down its comments. And here's the O. Henry ending:

What newspaper was this? The Rocky Mountain News, which completely ceased publication Feb. 27, 2009.

My reaction to the Kos post, after first thinking, hey, I was a beat reporter, followed by my catty attempts to to ID the jerky columnist, was, Have you ever read newspaper online comment threads? You'll save time by going directly to Stormfront or Ayn Rand fan sites.
But Pierce gave the issue some thought. And he called Markos out, for all the right reasons.

I'm sorry, this and this are examples of what John Peter Zenger would've called, "just being a prick."
I admire what Markos has accomplished. But, despite his pale and worthless disclaimer late in that first post--Spare us your pity--if this isn't gloating, I'd hate to see what he thinks gloating would be. A few points:
a) this is minor, but handing along a pivotal anecdote about the behavior of a "star columnist" without naming that columnist is what we in the old media refer to regularly as "chickenshit," and setting that story at a place where recently a couple of hundred people lost their jobs is graceless and cruel...

It goes on from there. And predictably, it inspired a characteristically humble Kos rejoinder.

The times are changing, and the culture with it. And consumers are getting increasingly sophisticated about how and where and from whom they consume their news. Shoot the messenger, Charlie, but it doesn't change anything.

To which my immediate reaction was, well, this.
Anyhow, it led to Lesson the Third: Insult Pierce at your peril. He quotes Kos:

"For Charlie Pierce and many of his journalism friends, this debate is about how they continue to get paid. For me, I don't give a shit who gets paid or how much, but whether people get the news they need to make informed decisions in a democracy. If people get paid in the process, great! If they don't, but people still get good information, then great!"

Then Pierce schools him:

I would argue that there are a great number of people in a great number of professions having a great number of conversations about how they will continue to get paid. Auto workers come immediately to mind. I give a shit about all of them, including the people in my profession. I would argue that giving a shit about whether or not people should get paid a decent wage for an honest day's work is what progressive populism used to be about. I don't recall any legitimate progressive determining on his own which work is worthy of having a shit given about it. I would argue that my friend in Chicago, who was a decent and honorable sportswriter with two young kids and a mortgage, and who was laid off this week because the Chicago Tribune is owned by a vicious vandal named Sam Zell who needs to have his balls in the mouth of a shark right about now, is worthy of having a shit given about him. I would argue that the cafeteria workers, security guards, printers, drivers--and the newsroom staffs--at the newspapers in Seattle and Denver that went under are worthy of having a shit given about them. Here, from the invaluable Ms. Jane's place, is a story about which The Future, by his own admission, probably doesn't give a shit.
Of course, I do not understand the new world of progressive activism, where some professions are unworthy of having a shit given about them. I weep at my ignorance, of course.

There's another lesson in all this, one which Pierce knows but the blogosphere too often misses as it ghoulishly watches the business of print journalism, my business, sink.
Lesson the Fourth: It is easy to be a pundit. Opinions are free, technology's cheap, and really, anyone can do it. Even me. Look at me now, I'm punditing! I'm king of the world! But not everyone can do it well. In many quarters of the media, especially in some of the most rarefied precincts, celebrity is mistaken for ability, and people are allowed to run on the fumes of reputation. That is what the blogosphere triumphalists howl at, correctly, and they rightly unmask frauds. But the frauds usually aren't laid off. Those are the grunts. The workers. The people who go to the council meetings and the courthouses and fires and crime scenes and farms and high school games and deliver the world, or a part of it, to the doorstep.
And they're dying. And no amount of first-person diaries and second-hand blogging and media critiques will replace them. Real news is a service, like working sewers or functioning schools or reliable power grids or effective garbage collection. It's the kind of service that separates a good society from a primitive one. If nobody does it, and does it well, you live in a lesser place. But doing it well is hard work. The kind of work that, as Pierce says, nobody should do, and most likely, nobody will do, without being paid a decent wage for it.