Taken from yesterday’s postscripts: Last time I looked, MSNBC.com was still using words —
mostly AP’s and Reuters’s, when not tapping into The Washington Post’s and Newsweek’s or
Forbes’s and Businessweek’s. To believe Jon Friedman’s
puff piece, however, you’d think not. You’d think MSNBC.com had
re-invented journalism “by using resources other than mere words and still photos.”
The site has been pushing that PR line for years. Friedman is just sucker enough to fall for it.
The top editor tells him, “We have a lot of tools in our toolbox for telling a story.” But reporters
and original reporting — what real journalism is all about — don’t count for much in that toolbox,
since MSNBC.com is mainly a glorified content aggregator. Friedman has nothing to say about
that except some hooey on being “liberated from old-fashioned journalism’s usual
limitations.”
A photo is worth at least several thousand words, says Leon (“He’s Our Calvin Trillin”)
Freilich:
CHEZ MSNBC
Words
Are
for the birds.
Photos
Are graphic grab-alls that tell a story with enough color, shading,
design, depth of field and harmony, all achieved on the cheap, to mesmerize, both within and
without Kansas, discerning canine buddies of Toto’s.
And a reader sends this message as a memo to the MSNBC.com honchos:
Take it from the aggrieved remark of Oscar Hammerstein’s wife: “Richard
Rogers didn’t write ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’ He wrote ‘La la la la la la.’ Nice, but not the same
thing.”
