Posted 7 months ago

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A defense of old media

I’m no different from everyone else who often finds themselves dismayed by the current state of journalism. As a citizen I found myself enraged that the New York Times let Judith Miller get away with peddling Bush administration distortions in a regular above-the-fold column during the build-up to the Iraq War. As a technology professional I am regularly unimpressed by the superficial coverage my profession receives in the Times’ “Circuits” supplement. As a person possessing at least half a brain I find myself borderline outraged that Tom Friedman gets published not once but twice a week. And as a a hard-working and ethical person I’m pretty livid that Jayson Blair ever held a job there.

And yes, I’m picking on the Times a little bit here—this only a day after Sheryl Gay Stolberg filed no fewer than 350 words on the President’s first tweet, giving us all a stark reminder of what we’ll be paying for (or not) when the Times transitions shortly to online subscriptions—but really, I’m only picking on them because I love them.

I really do: I love old media.

It took me a while of thinking about it for it to finally dawn on me, but I’m beginning to realize that much—if not most—of what I’m usually inclined to disdain about traditional journalism is generally a reflection of my own over-sized ego and over-zealous pride. And I have to wonder if I’m not alone here.

The reality of the situation is that it’s very rare that I open up a newspaper or a magazine and find reason to be outraged by someone’s inferior reporting. The reason for this is that such an occasion requires a rare confluence not only of bad reporting but also that I be better informed on the topic than the person doing the reporting (or alternatively, in most cases, that I merely have an opinion on the subject which objects to some purportedly dispassionate presentation of the matter).

But as rare as these occasions are they nonetheless tend to be more memorable than everything else I garner from reading a newspaper. Why is that? Because they flatter my ego! Because then I get to tell myself that I’m smarter than this hack! And I’m not even getting paid for it!

But what of the theater reviews? The daily international “Journal” feature? The Sunday magazine? The Book Review? And all the other components that make up this great newspaper I’ve been turning to for years now to open up new insights and introduce me to things I may never have found on my own? Am I going to throw out this precious baby with the bathwater all because the Times’ internet correspondent is a moron and Tom Friedman’s mustache gives me rage blackouts?

And that’s an important point: 99.9% of what the New York Times publishes makes me feel smarter, more informed, and all around better; .1% of it makes me feel better about myself because I get to think I’m smarter than somebody.

Moreover, what of the reader who has different areas of expertise from me? If the Times were to run a story on some internet trend that I were to find elementary or boring or uninstructive in its lack of details, wouldn’t it prove useless to all those readers who don’t share my same level of familiarity with this one particular topic?

And yes, we often make the argument that these people are being given a lackluster introduction to a topic with which they are unfamiliar, but in giving them this free pass aren’t we thus implicitly condemning these readers for not doing the one thing we all should be doing? Namely: putting in some extra leg work to learn more about those things that evade us? Aren’t we by extension damning ourselves? Or—rather—choosing not to engage in such troublesome introspection by simply blaming the messenger?

But there’s more than that. As it stands a publication like the New York Times is one of the few reliable sources I can turn to for finely curated, broad, expansive content. It’s one of the few outlets from which I’m not only guaranteed to learn something but from whom I can feel assured that whatever I’m learning about will aspire to a level of quality and interest I can respect. New media and the internet simply haven’t yet offered a suitable alternative to this enormous value. Sure, I’ve got friends who post great stuff on Facebook and I follow interesting people on Twitter and I read a lot of wonderful blogs, but none of these is quite the same as picking up a newspaper and reading it start-to-finish, because that activity is still so fundamentally different from all these forms of social aggregation, this activity of reading through something that is a cultural standard, a “paper of record”, and finding myself—however briefly—outside of my comfort zone.

And I think this is really where we ought to be every once in a while, because I know that so much of what I read on the internet anymore falls into the category of things that make me feel better because I already know too much about them. I can’t help but think this is a bad thing, since it’s only when we’re outside of our comfort zone that we’re really learning something, really discovering, and it’s when we insist on remaining inside that comfort zone that we become small.

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  1. canned reblogged this from langer and added:
    was worried that old media meant anything before...internet. But clearly
  2. gooneruk reblogged this from langer and added:
    Langer has written a great post detailing why he is still in love with old media, and in particular with
  3. langer posted this

 

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