February 14th, 2006
Press coverage and the war
Posted by
Administrator in
Will Atkinson
Did poor news coverage lead to the war?
Daniel Okrent, in a speech at Williams College asserted poor news coverage allowed the Iraq war to happen. Okrent is the new public editor at the New York Times.
He also discussed the journalism’s print situation.
It’s a “horrible time – financially” for newspapers, and the death of print is happening more quickly the he predicted six years ago.
Okrent said the lacking credibility and growing popularity of blogs has him uneasy. He ominously predicted the downfall of newspapers will happen during the current collegiate generation’s lifetime.
on February 15th, 2006 at 10:06 am
The death of newspapers is certainly not going to be something that I’ll be mourning in my lifetime - simply because it’s not going to happen in my lifetime.
The Blogosphere has a very, VERY long way to go before it stands a cat’s chance in hell of doing what papers do, or at least bettering what papers do.
I’d say one of the reasons for that is far too many inexperienced “journalists” are hiding behind their blogs to set themselves up as journalists.
I won’t name the site, but there is one in particular that is currently trying to set itself up as a new site and the process they have adopted is straight out of the chapters of a bad student newspaper - the whole verification and editing process is so fraught with problems that it will be a wonder if they EVER get to be anywhere near as established and respected as they want to be.
All this is very sad, because I would love to see more credible online sources for news that are outside the mainstream and not as tied to the advertsing pressures of a major corporation.
Very little that I’ve seen on the internet has encouraged me to want to work soley for either blogs or internet news sites.
And the one thing I have encountered tome and time again is a “them and us” attitude that is as strong from the print side of thinsg as it is from the blogger/internet side.
At the end of the day, it’s just glorified willy-waving and until that gets sorted, the evolution of online news is going to remain as stunted as it has been for years.
Just a thought from a passing print journalist and newbie blogger.