From stone to bronze, the human cost in old media

The SF Chronicle’s Mark Morford logged in on Friday with a spirited defense of the news organizations previously known as newspapers and a fine sprinkling of contempt for media theorists prognosticating about the future – Die, Newspapers, Die? – linked in ARTicles.

Morford offers grudging respect to Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, because of Shirky’s solid analysis, but Morford is sick of everybody without a stake in the old newsroom calling it done for:

This, to me, is the hoariest snag in any preachy “a mature
blogosphere will supplant old media” argument. In the howling absence
of all the essential, unglamorous work newspapers now do — the
fact-checking, interviewing, researching, all by experienced pros who
know how to sift the human maelstrom better than anyone, and all
hitched to 100+ years of hard-fought newsbrand credibility — what’s
the new yardstick for integrity? On what do you base your choices? Some
fickle mix of personal mood, blood-alcohol level, and how many
followers your given source has on Twitter? Right.

I disagree with Winer in one huge way: When the professional
news filters vanish, when you lose that vigorous center of storytelling
expertise, you don’t necessarily get a rich ‘n’ wonderful mix of
new choices. You get chaos. You get noise. Sure, it might be a boatload
of fun to read, but it’s also maddening as hell.

Of course Morford is right. Nothing has yet arisen to replace the organization of fact hunters and checkers who research and verify what sees print in a newspaper. Working without a team paid to weigh and assess every word is writing without a net. Editors can leave rope burns on copy or strangle it outright, but more often they save writers from themselves.

In spite of their expertise and devotion to the truth, however, newspapers have too frequently failed us.Take the New York Times, the best of the best. Judith Miller’s reporting on the Iraq War helped get us into that war. Those phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction? According to her, they were real. (Morford, on the other hand, got it right, early and often.)

In my own small case of online only, as a former member of a far less illustrious newspaper team than the NYT, I’m banking on readers to tell me when I’m wrong and to debate the debatable. So far,so good. Plus, change is inevitable.

Here’s Mitchell and Webb on orientation day at the dawn of the Bronze Age. Stone chippers were not amused. (Thanks to Tim Appelo for link.)