All Hands Online!

by Andrew Bast

Three years ago, I dreamed up The New York Inquirer, and The New Yorker was the faucet feeding my pipe dream. The best-edited weekly magazine in the English language had it all: brilliant writers, class, sass, and wit. And I wanted my mine, The Inquirer, to offer it all too, like the mythical Charles Foster Kane's newspaper of the same name. (Or, almost. His was The New York Daily Inquirer.)

Journalism, however, is a clubby sport. Unlike attorneys who pass the bar exam and are subject to the association of the same name, or doctors who pass board exams and swear the Hippocratic oath, journalists answer only to the haughty civic decree bestowed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Even as I wrote substantial pieces for several papers, I was never quite secured that invite to the club. Instead I stuck my hands in the mud, and now The Inquirer is in its third month with a full staff.

So it was with little surprise that I read Nicholas Lehmann’s New Yorker piece that blathered on about Internet journalism, preaching about the evolving form: “Citizen journalists are supposedly inspired amateurs.” The tone throughout: Elitist, who, me? And the article’s title? “Amateur Hour.”

Lehmann is no joke. He a bespectacled bloke with a curvy smile, and on top of writing for The New Yorker, he’s Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (the $45,000 rite of passage into the trade for those who didn’t have a father at the Times or Washington Post). Lehmann’s written for just about every essential outlet in the country, but his take on what is clearly a transformative moment for the entire news media industry is nothing short of confounding.

Only days after The New Yorker article ran, Lehmann announced that he was slashing the budget for online operations of the Columbia Journalism Review. CJR is an incisive industry publication; the online site produces its own original content. With the salvaged funds, Lehmann planned a direct-mail campaign to support the print edition. Two CJR onliners resigned. Perhaps they were confused by the conclusion of Lehmann's New Yorker article, which read, “As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.”

Maybe I buried the lead: with every passing day, journalism progresses in its magnificent migration to the Internet. Newspaper circulation has been dropping for years. If your 401K looked like the Nielsen chart of nightly news viewers, you’d have pulled out long ago. On the Internet, Nicholas Kristof can file a column from the Central African Republic, narrate a video spot, and hype a blog written by his traveling companion Casey Parks, an aspiring journalist. Try doing that on page A23. And I’m betting the farm that should Ms. Parks someday win a Pulitzer, there won’t have been any ink at all.

Editors make journalism. The reporters, designers, production teams, and ad sales staff are all essential, but it’s an editor who says, “This ain’t fit to print.” That’s where journalism begins. The CJR has editors; blogs do not. Perhaps this is where Lehmann conflated the issues. A website with editors is online journalism, no matter how you slice it, and no matter whether you collect a Condé Nast paycheck or not.

So cheers to the jobless CJR staffers, let them give birth to an online review that will take stock of the media landscape. I hope that The Inquirer rides the crest of this new journalistic wave, and if that’s all I got, at least I know, offering readers a fair and responsible report online, that we’re pointed in the right direction.

(Originally published 10/5/06. Image from flickr.)

Comments

[Joe]

No matter what elitists tell you, writing is like toothpaste - simply another product sitting on the shelf waiting to be chosen.

However, the barrier of entry been has been removed by the Internet and the elitists don't like that.

But it's still capitalism.......where the best survive. Lots of mousetraps to be built Andy. Best of Luck!!!

[Peter Eichenberger]

Quotes on paper-and-ink journalism from two legendary publishers.

"News is what somebody else wants suppressed. All the rest is advertising."
Lord Northridge, The Times (London)

"Advertising is the heart and soul of the free press." Josephus Daniels, The News and Observer(Raleigh) NC
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