Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Extra

Chris Hedges, about whom I know nothing, is concerned about the future of journalism, particularly if that future is dominated by the Huffington Post. He argues that
The daily reporting and monitoring of city halls, courts, neighborhoods and government, along with investigations into corporate fraud and abuse, will be replaced by sensational garbage and Web packages that are made to look like news but contain little real news.
If only the local newspapers would have stuck to this model. The "Wisconsin State Journal," outside of the sports page, carries nearly no regular accounts of the nuts and bolts of everyday life in Madison and environs. Plus and also, it's badly written, uninformative, and disingenuous on those subjects it does deal with.  I neither like nor read The Huffington Post, for the reasons he outlines and the fact that Arianne Huffingtonpost is, I think, Beelzebub.

3 comments:

  1. I spend a lot of time in St George Utah and they have a surprisingly good local paper. One thing about Utah is that people really do seem to see themselves as part of a community and take news and politics more seriously. of course you can't buy beer on Sundays and evryone takes anti-depressants but got a take the good with the bad.

    I agree with you about the huffington post for the most part it kind of sux

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  2. There's lots of good papers out there, particularly small town ones. The Anderson Valley Advertiser was, when I used to read it, really very good. The thing about the WSJ that baffles is that it is in the state capital, home to a world-class university, filled with smart and well informed folks who like to read and yet the paper is a nearly perfect example of what a paper oughtn't be like and, it some times seems, the editors and publishers go out of their way to hire only the most stultifying journos in existence. Puzzling.

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  3. But the WSJ journal looks great in the bottom of a birdcage

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