THE SORTS OF FOLKS WHO ATTEND THOSE MEETINGS WITHOUT GETTING PAID...;

All I Wanted for Christmas Was a Newspaper: Bloggers are no replacement for real journalists. (PAUL MULSHINE, 12/27/08, Wall Street Journal)

Someone is always heralding the rise of "the intellectual declaration of independence of the American people," as H.L. Mencken once put it.

In his 1920 essay "The National Letters," Mencken traced this sentiment back to the early days of our democracy. He noted how first Ralph Waldo Emerson and then Walt Whitman prophesized the rise of what Whitman termed "a class of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known." Mencken was pessimistic about this prospect thanks to what he termed "the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes."

I share that pessimism. Every time a new medium arises, a new group of avatars arises with it, assuring us of the wondrous effects it will produce for our democracy.

I encountered this back in the early 1970s in my communications classes at Rutgers. Cheap, portable video cameras had just been invented, and I was assured by the bearded professors and grad students that these cameras would lead to a rebirth of democracy. The citizenry would start recording public meetings and the result would be a revolution.

Now we're hearing the same thing about the blogosphere. "When enough bloggers take the leap, and start reporting on the statehouse, city council, courts, etc. firsthand, full-time, then the Big Media will take notice and the avalanche will begin," Mr. Reynolds quotes another blogger as saying. If this avalanche ever occurs, a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.

After I got out of Rutgers, I began as a reporter at a newspaper in Ocean County, N.J. If the Toms River Regional Board of Education had not offered free coffee, I fear that I might have been found the next day curled up on the floor in the back of the room like Rip Van Winkle. As it was, I only made it through the endless stream of resolutions and speeches by employing trance-inducing techniques learned in my youth during religion class at St. Joseph's school up the street.

The common thread here, whether the subject is foreign, national or local, is that the writer in question is performing a valuable task for the reader -- one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the "executive summary."

...you wouldn't trust to deliver the newspaper, nevermind deliver the news.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 27, 2008 4:36 PM