Why the Washington Post Is Not a Trusted Curator...
Because those who write for it who tell me where they are coming from aren't coming from reality, and the rest won't tell me where they are coming from--so I cannot trust them.
Mstthew Yglesias:
What Is Hidden and What Is Revealed: Something that pops up every time old/new media tensions emerge is the view—which I find, frankly, bizarre—common in the newspaper world that pretending to not have opinions makes your work better... the ideal reporter would be someone who actually doesn’t have opinions... “the facts”... could be... observed, processed, and then regurgitated into inverted pyramid form without passing through the muck of “judgment.”...
Then the secondary presumption is that you can somehow make things real by pretending. Like if you want to express judgments about politicians in conversations with your friends, that’s fine, but you have to never publish them.... [If] something “private” goes “public” now your actual professional work is invalidated... keeping the views secret is supposed to be a close substitute for not having them.... [That] leads to the odd conclusion that the best journalist is a consistently dishonest one.
And:
The Innovators Dilemma: I think the odds are quite good that The Washington Post won’t exist in anything remotely resembling its current form in 20 or 30 years.... [T]here are many better-positioned brands and firms... BBC, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and Reuters as is News Corporation’s family of brands. Beyond that, AOL-Time Warner’s family brands has considerable strength, so does the rapidly growing NPR.... That’s seven, which is a lot fewer than the quantity we have now, but by any objective measure it’s a lot. Figure that everyone is going to consume a fair amount of locally oriented media along with specialty media focused on areas of particular interest. How many general-purpose English language news brands is any given person going to want to follow on a typical day. One or maybe two I would think....
[I]t’s going to be tough out there. Really tough. And in some ways it’s especially tough for an organization like The Washington Post... [where] a large number of Post staffers loathe and despise... the paper’s... signature efforts to obtain relevance in a digital age.... [T]he ethos cultivated at smid-sized urban daily is different from the ethos of the new media... that... makes it extremely difficult to compete with smaller, nimbler organizations that can... snagg... talented people...
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
