Bloggerz can has journalisms?

Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer has seen the future, and it pisses her off.

Certainly, we are concerned about job stability. But veteran journalists are equally troubled by the online threat to standards we hold dear.

If anyone had told me five years ago that newspapers would allow anonymous comments and that we would have to respond to them, I would have invited them to come for a walk with me to the land of grown-ups. Now, I regularly address authors of online comments by their made-up names and pretend this doesn’t feel like junior high school all over again.

The so-called citizen journalism of most blogs is an affront to those of us who believe reporting and attribution must precede publication.

Sorry Connie, but when reporter Chuck Todd is telling the world that the U.S. has no business conducting internal war crimes investigations and Dan Balz of the Washington Post can’t get through a health care column without using two unnamed sources, the incredible nobility of the mainstream media can perhaps be missed.

The mainstream media is suffering because they have consistently done a piss-poor job for years. “Citizen journalists” didn’t enter the fray and destroy the ethics of “real” journalists. “Citizen journalism” came as a result of the mainstream media’s failures and lack of ethics.

Put it this way, only Major League Baseball players that are doing poorly are threatened by minor league players. And currently, mainstream media players are being consistently shown up by their citizen journalist counterparts and have every reason to feel threatened.

–WKW

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