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Pure pundit poop

27 comments on Pure pundit poop

Pure pundit poop
: Leave it to Eric Alterman to insult bloggers in a Mark Glaser roundtable:

I think the jury is still out on what effect blogging will have on journalism. The original bloggers who made a difference journalistically were journalists….

There are a few exceptions, there are a few people who are amateur bloggers who are so good at it that journalists have to keep up with what they do. There are a tiny number of them, and I don’t know how they do it financially, I don’t know what the model is…. I don’t know how people who do it for fun do it. My blog is a part of my professional job, but I could never justify the time I devote to it if I weren’t getting paid. Maybe for people who don’t have families.

So the question is, is the model with the voluntary blogger who actually creates great journalistic value on his blog sustainable? I think it’s too early to tell.

Perhaps, Eric, these are simply people who care. What a concept, caring.

What a snotty attitude: Only the pros and a “tiny” number of others can do this. What crap. The whole thing is a bit hard to take but, as always, Alterman takes the cake.

: Reader Howard Aylward forwards this: Alterman discovers that Castro’s not nice.

27 responses to “Pure pundit poop”

  1. Andrea Harris Avatar
    Andrea Harris

    He sure sounds like he enjoys writing. “I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t getting paid.” I see.

  2. evariste Avatar
    evariste

    Andrea-well, the quality of his stuff shows it, too.

  3. Leo Avatar
    Leo

    I heard Mr. Alterman on the Laura Ingraham show
    a few months ago, it wasn’t brought up in the
    conversation, but I thought he was a real beleiver
    in credentialism, he kept talking about trained
    journalists and degrees and so forth, using lack
    of journalism degrees at brickbats to toss at
    people.
    To be a writer, write, to be a reporter, report.
    _shrug_
    Leo

  4. Buster Avatar
    Buster

    Alterman sucks, period.

  5. JorgXMcKie Avatar
    JorgXMcKie

    Naw. If he sucked we could at least use him to vacuum the carpet.

  6. HH Avatar
    HH

    He is what Bernie Goldberg talks about when he mentions elitists in the media, which made his attempts to refute him all the funnier.

  7. Orbit Rain Avatar
    Orbit Rain

    I have a guess at his perspective…he thinks its a great hassle to speak your mind a little bit each day, on the daily happenings in this world…
    As long as one is following what’s going on, why not throw a few thoughts in the mix? How hard is *that*?
    Writers may suffer from a delusion that the world actually *does* revolve around their pen. And that those that differ and refuse to defer…are surmised as missing a bit of logic.. “a poor lass indeed, to be suffered…he that disagrees with me.”
    meow :/

  8. Slartibartfast Avatar
    Slartibartfast

    Damn, Jorg, beer all over the keyboard. Please provide a non-beersafe warning before coming out with stuff like that, or I’m going to have to report you to OSHA. Or something.

  9. David Crisp Avatar
    David Crisp

    You seem to be missing what appears to me to be his point: It’s not that you have to have credentials but that you have to be able to make a living. Can hobbyists in their spare time replace what journalists do all day long? Maybe, given a strong enough blogging community that includes enough experts and committed amateurs in enough fields. And given, maybe, enough people willing to donate to Pay Pal to finance reporting projects on given topics. But who, in the blogging world, is going to sit through school board meetings to make sure the trustees don’t have their hands in the till? And who is going to check the police blotter to make sure no one is being held on trumped-up charges? Or, for that matter, who’s going to type in the obits so people will know who died yesterday? Journalism has never been about pedigrees and clever writing. It’s about sifting through a lot of boring stuff so the good stuff doesn’t get missed (don’t bother to remind me of the old line about how journalists separate the wheat from the chaff, then print the chaff). I agree with Alterman: It’s too early to tell.

  10. tom Avatar
    tom

    David: it’s the editors who print the chaff
    (sorry folks, couldn’t resist).

  11. Seth Finkelstein Avatar
    Seth Finkelstein

    What David Crisp said.
    It’s not about speaking your mind every day – remember, opinions are like, err, noses, everyone has one.
    One thing I’ve noticed, a lot of otherwise conservative people tend to get weirdly anti-capitalist whenever anyone points out the problems which stem from expecting people to work for free, in this context. Stuff which would otherwise be sneeringly dismissed as wooly-headed naive flower-child 60’s hippie socialism (etc. etc.), is suddenly gospel where, in dreaded insider terms, everyone else doesn’t get it. There might be a lesson in that.

  12. Kirk Parker Avatar
    Kirk Parker

    Can someone please tell my why anyone pays the slightest attention to what Alterman says?

  13. Robert Scoble Avatar
    Robert Scoble

    I work at Microsoft. I blog at nights. Yeah, I trade my TV time to blog for free. I don’t see why that’s such a hard concept to understand.
    Is it sustainable? I’ve been doing it for four years. I’ve worked for Microsoft now for six months. My blog is at http://scoble.weblogs.com.

  14. hugh macleod Avatar
    hugh macleod

    Hi Robert (Scoble). Just visited your site. Some nice stuff on there. Like the points you made about RSS, especially. Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you want -Hugh

  15. John Avatar
    John

    “So the question is, is the model with the voluntary blogger who actually creates great journalistic value on his blog sustainable?”
    I depend on bloggers to channel me to stories that I would never have the time to find myself. For me a blogger doesn’t necessarily have to create any journalistic value.

  16. Paul A'Barge Avatar
    Paul A’Barge

    What’s with the Castro link? Netscape shows nada.

  17. KMK Avatar
    KMK

    Alterman misses the point. The Internet is about information. Blogs are no different then someone who puts up a “how to” site just for the sake of “how to.” Blogs add the instant conversation as opposed to a chat board and it’s much more diversified. The one thing everyone brings up is how do bloggers make money for what they do? “How to” sites don’t make money unless they are pushing a product either and there are millions of “how to sites.” Does it always have to be about the money?

  18. James DiBenede Avatar
    James DiBenede

    David:
    Bloggers can’t out-and-out “replace” journalists, no. But that isn’t the point. Creating journalistic value, as Alterman puts it, is not the same thing as saying that bloggers will someday put the New York Times out of business.
    Certainly the Iraqi bloggers and their reports from Baghdad provide every bit as much journalistic value as stories filed by American reporters there…more, arguably.

  19. David Crisp Avatar
    David Crisp

    Thanks, Tom, for the link. I’ve heard that line in various forms for years and have never seen it attributed to Adlai Stevenson. Cool.
    James DiBenede: You are right about the Iraqi bloggers and other eyewitness accounts. They are invaluable. But I think the question of the extent to which bloggers can replace journalists is very much to the point. If journalism (as opposed to media) is moving from a capitalist “professional” model to an volunteer “open commons” model, which I think is a possibility, then it’s worth fretting a bit about what sort of journalistic world we will inhabit.

  20. Sgt. Mom Avatar
    Sgt. Mom

    Well, with luck, there is a blogger on the ground where something interesting is happening, or maybe a blogger who has particular knowlege or expertise pertinant to an issue. Having the knowlege direct from the source, without being filtered through the usual sources puts a whole different view of the event or situation into play.

  21. Kevin Avatar
    Kevin

    Howard, Kevin, whatever… :-)

  22. therealitycheck_isinthemail Avatar
    therealitycheck_isinthemail

    How silly are we getting here?
    Can someone tell me the problem with this?
    >
    Lots of good people care. Lots of partisan nuts with axes to grind and misinformation to spread also care.

  23. the realitycheck_is inthemail Avatar
    the realitycheck_is inthemail

    The quote I meant to cite —
    So the question is, is the model with the voluntary blogger who actually creates great journalistic value on his blog sustainable? I think it’s too early to tell.
    The problem?
    And why does Alterman suck? He seems solid and reasonable most of time.

  24. tom mangan Avatar
    tom mangan

    OK, I’m opening myself up for being called an idiot, but this thought springs to mind:
    The objections to blogging are in one sense similar to the objections to Martha Stewart: people are intimidated by her ability to do all this stuff they could never find time to do themselves, and they express that intimidation in hostility to the whole Martha phenomenon.
    People always ask me, “how do find time to do all that?” I do it by not doing other stuff I find less interesting. People look at our blogs and think “gee, I could do that,” but our blogs force them to confront the fact that they haven’t. So it reflects poorly on them and makes them want to blame us for their own failings.
    And let’s face it, the Web has this gee-wizness to it that makes lots of people wish they were in on all the fun. Those of us who are in on it act like we’re in some kind of select club, and that annoys outsiders too. You can’t do anything well without annoying somebody, because success tends to shine a light on failure.

  25. Seth Finkelstein Avatar
    Seth Finkelstein

    “Don’t hate us because we’re beautiful”? Naahh…

  26. tom Avatar
    tom

    Seth: good point (one useful test of an idea is whether it can be dismissed with a single pithy comment)

  27. xian Avatar
    xian

    It’s true that the kind of journalism you can’t do without being paid to spend all your time on it will not be replaced by voluntary blogging.
    When I started a noncommercial web zine in 1994 the most common question was could I continue doing it forever without money. Of course I couldn’t. We stopped doing it in 1998, but I’ve never stopped publishing stuff online in many forms. The fact that it wasn’t a “profit center” for me was never the most interesting thing about cheap and freely available worldwide publishing.
    In the long run, we’re all dead. You orbit a planet by falling the whole time. People are motivated by more than just money.