Sorry Jack Shafer the Public Is Not Going Away
It wasn’t too long ago that Jack Shafer, Slate’s media critic, was declaring public journalism dead. Of course, we public journalists were put on the defensive, and I wrote a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, saying we were very much alive.
Now Shafer is going after bloggers, but in a different way. He has to point out that mainstream media is very much alive. He is on the defensive, but still has that nasty contempt for citizen participation with priggish little paragraphs like:
…what I dowrite, post, link, read, communicate with readers, devote myself to an arcane subjectresembles what most bloggers do, except that I get paid for it, and I tend to write twice or three times a week at 1,000 words rather than several times daily at a paragraph or three. The biggest difference between me and conventional bloggers is that I usually pause between first thought and posting. Inspired by the slow food movement, I like to think of myself as a slow blogger. Sometimes I’m so slowas this Wednesday dispatch from a Friday-Saturday conference provesthat I resemble a conventional journalist.
He thinks of himself as a slow blogger, but there are at least a few bloggers who think of him just as a slow thinker — and not very intellectually honest.
Yet, for all he says about bloggers, a couple of years ago, he had little competition, now the bloggers he berates like Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis are his competition. And my guess is that when he writes about bloggers his readership goes up. So in this case it pays to bite the blogs that feed him.
