David Simon breaks it down for you
By martha
There’s been a LOT of ink–stained handwringing over the crisis in journalism of late. Some of it is great; some of it is, IMHO, a bit of self-interested windbaggery — on the part of both the old fogies longing for the good ol’ City News Bureau days and the young webheads jacked by the pipe dream (sorry) of the $2 million newsroom.*
Self-interest is a barb I once lobbed, halfheartedly, at David Simon. But I would never argue that on this topic he hasn’t earned the right to ponitificate. And the other day he did so in fine form.
If you don’t understand why old-school journalists keep plantively wondering, “But who’s gonna cover the water board hearing?” this will go a long way toward explaining. And he does it in time-honored style — by showing, with a story, not telling, with a tirade.
*And you know — eh. I’m not going to say which I might think is which. Because I don’t think journalism can be saved by endless blog posts about who’s right and who’s an asshole. And because I fall — by both birthdate and temperament, not to mention clue-havingness — smack in the middle of the spectrum and my opinion changes with the moon.
Unfortunately, I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to have a period of diminished news gathering before the new shapes of media will take hold. The newspapers and the ad agencies and the clients that supported them failed to find some way to make the leap from mass media to targeted media; so they will have to die, and then, with all that money out there looking for some way to reach audiences, people will start creating media that do the job and ad agencies will figure out how to fund them.
We can wish that it hadn’t happened this way, but ten years ago I was working on New Century Network and it was obvious that the heart of the big newspapers wasn’t in it and they weren’t scared enough to cooperate and make it work. So we’ll have a dark ages, and then a renaissance.