Pete Hamill made an outrageous ruling on blogs and journalistic education on Brian Lehrer’s show on WNYC yesterday. Ready, aim, flame:
You know blogging, the blogosphere. When I teach at NYU I try to tell these young potential journalists: don’t waste your time with blogs because you need to be somewhere where there are editors, where you are getting paid. A blog might be useful therapy, but it’s not, at this stage of its development, journalism. I think that is a big mistake to be doing that kind of stuff.
I think I’ll just let that sit there.
Lehrer and Hamill were talking about local reporters:
LEHRER: When I think about newspaper columnists, it seems to me there’s a lost generation. That the entire art has changed. There were people like you and Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton and others. Who were going out to neighborhood bars, writing about individuals. Or writing about policy through the story of individuals. Now there are lots of policy columnists today and some very good ones, even in the present day New York tabloids. But I don’t think there’s the same emphasis on the individual story. And very much the individual immigrant story. Do you think?
HAMILL: I agree with you. I think one reason for it is the overdependence on the internet: to sit in a building and call up all the statements from politician x y or z or think tank a b or c is not the same as going to 116th street and seeing the change over from Puerto Rican culture to Mexican culture.
So the internet and blogs are bad for journalism. Or is that just bad for columnists? Or Hamill? Or journalism students?
Here’s the audio:
I spoke later with Lehrer producer Jim Colgan. We didn’t bother with that blog bigotry. But I said that there is now more reporting going on at least in some neighborhoods and towns thanks to local bloggers. Lehrer is having one of them, Bob Guskind, who blogs at Gowanus Lounge and is the Brooklyn editor of Curbed, on the show today at 11a to talk about this. But I also pointed out that blogs also give us the voice of the people directly; they need not go through the filters of columnists and editors to be heard. If you want to listen. Which is what I thought journalists were supposed to do.
Journalism students: I wouldn’t waste your time with this advice about blogs.
