Originally Posted by
professorscott
In the current Bill/Lowell debate - and I have great respect for both writers - I have to lean quite a bit toward Bill's side. People caught up in the "blogosphere" are underestimating what exactly "journalism" as a profession is.
I read Detroit Yes frequently, to get a pulse on the thinking of the local blogerati, and to join in when I feel I have knowledge or value to add, or when I feel like pouring gasoline on a fire. A journalist I am not. If I want to know what is actually happening around Detroit, I read several local papers [[Freep, News, Macomb Daily, Metro Times, Crain's). Sometimes I read the print editions and sometimes I read online, and I actually prefer print. I don't subscribe to all of them because my local library does, and I spend a good deal of time there.
Younger people [[your kindly old Prof is just about eligible for AARP and so is speaking of others here) get information from a variety of sources. It's fair to say most 22 year olds don't subscribe to the Free Press, but neither did you when you were 22. Yet the young people I encounter [[in my biz that's a decent size crowd) are keeping up with local current events somehow, whether it's from channel 4 or the freep.com web site or whatever. In any case, sources where people are paid to produce information.
The essential problem with crowd journalism is that it is a sourceless pipe in and of itself. The actual information which blogs endlessly disseminate, skew and opine about comes from outside the blogosphere. Crowd journalism has created, so far as I can tell, very little information that didn't come from outside. I don't see anyone from Huffington at the local city council meeting or photographing the drug bust, I see the Freep and Crain's and channel 4 and WWJ doing that. And in the future, if there is to be any notion of "news" at all, we will have to continue to pay people to create and publish it.
Now, the print vs. online argument is entirely different, but since a very great many people still don't have access to computers or the internet [[and don't know how to use either one), I hope print survives over the long term somehow. But in any case, fifty years from now, we will still be reading news written by professionals, even if we are getting it from them very indirectly.
All this, as always, is just in the Prof's VHO.