Perhaps the Strangest Article I Have Read, Ever (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)

Howell Raines on Jim Romanesko:

Jim Romenesko's Impact on Journalism: How the first media gossip site inadvertently ushered in the era of fact-free journalism: [We] ink-stained traditionalists... were aflutter about Poynter['s]... nervy decision to hire an obscure gossip blogger... on Poynter’s dignified website....

[T]he famously reclusive blogger... cloistered digital monk... a true obsessive... a lonely-guy existence....

[D]isgruntled newsies... quickly discovered that by having Romenesko post their internal memos they could manipulate their bosses... the late Gerald Boyd and I... were among the first to get Romenesko’d out of our jobs.... I never really blamed the messenger.... [M]any editors [do],... grousing that Romenesko’s blog at poynter.org feeds gloom and doom in the nation’s newsrooms... a high-tech tom-tom for angst-ridden members of a dying tribe....

Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product--verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko’s rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information... it’s not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information....

I’m not sure Romenesko has yet grasped that the informational storm he unleashed a decade ago is already undermining his prominence.... Romenesko is Poynter’s highest-paid nonexecutive employee, at more than $170,000 a year....

[But] Gawker now reaches an audience several times larger than Romenesko’s and has paid backhanded tributes to “mild-mannered Jim Romenesko, who runs the most feared blog in journalism (except for this one).”... [I]ts readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. “I don’t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn’t directly relate to me,” says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper.... “Romenesko... provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry--an invaluable tool for that master’s thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper.”...

The swift rise and incipient eclipse of Romenesko illustrates what a quick trip it is from guru to geezer in cyberspace... the Manhattan buzz is that Gawker too has already peaked. Traditionalist critics view Romenesko as the guy who opened the first and biggest hole in the sacred wall between news and gossip in reporting about the media. The newer media blogs, however, see him as being confined by passé, self-imposed rules, such as his steady refusal to make his own website into a political soapbox and post the most extreme commentators from the alternative press....

Yellow journalism begat objective journalism, which begat investigative journalism, which begat advocacy journalism... New Journalism... gossip journalism to our next stop: fact-free journalism.... [Romanesko has] proven that speedily aggregated, often unsubstantiated information is marketable....

Roy Peter Clark and others at [Poynter]... are anxious that an internet giant like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo will soon dangle a big salary in front of [Romanesko] to shift-key his daily bundle of nearly 100,000 unique visitors over to its website.... I say this to the Monk of Evanston about the next time the big dogs come sniffing around: Take the money.

There are comments on the Portfolio website:  

I don't know where Raines gets the idea that Romenesko's blog is gossip that can easily be dismissed. Some of it is, of course. But links to the more scurrilous stuff are listed right alongside the links to Howard Kurtz, Richard Perez-Pena and whoever covers media at the Wall Street Journal these days. Sometimes, the smaller fry have better insights and better facts, and write it in a more interesting way. Some of those folks pushed Raines from his NYT perch.... By PSteiger

Romenesko aggregates articles almost wholly from newspapers and the traditional press, so if it's a collection of unverified facts, that only goes to show what a poor job Raines's old pals are doing. By SteveRhodes

I'm sorry, but what did Howell Raines ever build from scratch? Jim Romenesko started with zero daily viewers and now gets a steady stream of 100,000-plus readers. Raines was handed the reins of the Times DC bureau and later the entire paper, just as he was handed the reins of this blog. When Raines was in charge of the Times, he didn't do much to prevent shrinking readership or to reach the young readers he now contends are no longer as interested in Romenesko's site. I never thought it possible, but Raines is actually jealous of Jim Romensko. Well done, Jim! By DeanRotbart

Jim Romensko was in Minnesota, not Wisconsin, when he started his site. By kal

There are, I think, only three "facts" I did not already know--and I don't know much about Jim Romanesko or Poynter: (1) Poynter pays Jim Romanesko $170K a year. (2) Jim Romanesko turned down an offer to jump to Brill's Content five years ago. (3) Gawker's "readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. 'I don’t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn’t directly relate to me,' says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper.... 'Romenesko... provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry--an invaluable tool for that master’s thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper'..."

And, of course, this third is not a "fact." Howell Raines has no magic surveillance machine with which he takes the pulse of what Gawker's readers say. And we all know how worthless is Howell Raines's ability to find one reporter who--anonymously--will serve as a sock puppet and do Howell Raines's bidding by saying that Jim Romanesko is a has-been about to be consumed by the monster he created. It would be something--but not much--if the "young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper" were willing to be named. It would be considerably more if Howell Raines had made some effort to demonstrate that the views of his sock puppet were in any sense representative or influential. But he doesn't. And so there are no "facts" here--at least not for any meaningful definition of "facts"--save for some interesting conclusions about the soul of Howell Raines that jump out of the page and seize one by the throat.

By contrast, I always find a huge number of interesting facts about the world whenever I surf on over to Romanesko...

Comments

[David Lloyd-Jones]

.

Lemme get this straight: the guy who inflicted Jason Blair and Judith Miller on the polity has the brass balls to lecture the Netroots on factuality, integrity, responsibility?

Gimme a fershlugginer break.

-dlj.

[howard]

david sort of beats me to the punch: i was going to inquire as to when that wonderful period was when newspapers consisted of "verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance."

[Queequeg]

All of us fervently hope that we don't someday write something that exposes ourselves in such a poor light as Howell Raines did.

And Brad, the spelling is Romenesko. Because you so often criticize poor reporting, it behooves you to spell proper names correctly, especially when you've just cut-and-pasted that name.

[As I said, I don't know very much about Jim Romenesko... And Howell Raines's article was the most bizarre thing I have read in quite a while...]

[John Emerson]

Interview with Lara Logan:

“Do you watch the news that we’re watching in the United States?” Stewart asked. “Do you see what we’re hearing about the war?”

“No,” replied Logan. “If I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I’d just blow my brains out, because it would drive me nuts.”

http://rawstory.com/news08/2008/06/18/cbs-foreign-correspondent-watching-us-news-would-drive-me-nuts/

Lara Logan is perfectly wonderful in every way. She's done good reporting in toughest of conditions, and she's fought her employers to try to get her excellent reporting broadcast. Often unsuccessfully.

It's not that there aren't any good American journalists. It's just that the bad ones are much more famous, more influential and better paid.

Because this is **America** goddammit. That's the way we do things -- the **American** way.

And as always: it's a management problem, not a reporter problem. The crappy reporters that there are have been hired because management wants crappy reporters. And the good reporters are going nuts.

[redoubt]

(First time commenter)

Romenesko used to call the site MediaNews until Dean Singleton made him stop. (I wonder how much schadenfreude he's enjoying now.)

[John Emerson]

Correction: While I'm sure that there are Good American journalists, Lara isn't one of them. She's a South African.

[trotsky]

I learn a lot from Romenesko. Alas, most of it makes me wish I had a bottle stashed in my desk drawer.

[Fifi]

Something made me gasp

"it’s not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information...."

Erhhhh, no. Not really. Or, more accurately, REALLY NOT!

That's the key problem of newspapers and assorted traditional media: what they offer is not so much superior than what one can glean from mixing agency wires and a handful of DFHs who happen to have a blog and know what the f*** they talking about on a few select subjects.

Newspapers are going the way of the dodo because they are not good enough to justify paying for them. Most of their journalism is plain crap, useless "he said, she said" pap interspersed with bland reiteration of banalities on the subject at hand. And the rare truly first-rate reporting they do is generally more suited for a magazine format than a daily or a news show. Add the cultivation of useless "insiders" and the nursing of advertisers' easily bruised feelings to the journos' incompetence and the editors' stupidity and the final product just plainly sucks.

There is a huge need for professional news reporting and filtering, more than ever in our era of endless "communication" and constant data overload. But news reporting as it exists is nowhere near what it needs to deliver and far too often, it only adds to the noise rather than help reject it.

Give me something that brings down the noise.

I don't know what it would look like, probably a mix of dry factual reporting (*), contextual recapitulations, truly expert analysis(+), the whole thing abundantly linked with an in-depth encyclopedia, updated on a daily basis and a well organized archive. Now, that's something I would pay for, probably north of $1,000 a year.

(* And I don't want no stinkin' "telling quotes" in my news, no quips from Joe Schmo and Jane Blah, "insiders" I don't give a s**t about and who are just pushing their own agenda in 30 words. If the journo cannot put the words in his own mouth, it's not news! Got it, punk?)

(+ Expertise, not pap from six different schmos adulterated by a journo in the middle. You know, stuff from experts, real ones, from a farm of expert experts the news reporter calls when a specific subject comes up, real "insiders" the kind worth cultivating. DFHs if you will.)

[crf]

As you can see in the comments, Romenesko is spelled with an e.

[I said I did not know very much about him!]

[Gen. JC Christian, patriot]

Ahmad Chalabi is now a "young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper?" Who'd a thunk it?

[Gen. JC Christian, patriot]

Ahmad Chalabi is now a "young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper?" Who'd a thunk it?