Times' Writer Discovers The Internet:
"Professional Journalists" Seek Foundation Funding
Instead of Customers Seeking News
"They still don't get it, and never will. That's why when their stock value reaches zero, we'll still be here laughing at their demise."
--JammieWearingFool on the New York Times
Six Hundred Visitors a Day
--and All the Pixels You Can Eat
RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA of the New York Times ($7.00 NYSE, down from $21.14 a year ago) turned on his computer and discovered a non-threatening form of Internet--websites that are run by refugees of failed newspapers.
As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.
Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
Their news coverage and hard-digging investigative reporting stand out in an Internet landscape long dominated by partisan commentary, gossip, vitriol and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs.
The San Diego site gets around 18,000 visitors a month--about 600/day--but it's run by "professional journalists" as opposed to "unpaid amateurs", so it's worth some ink in the NY Times. As Jammie Wearing Fool observes ['This Is the Future of Journalism']
Let's see: Partisan commentary, vitriol and gossip? Sounds like your average day on the Times op-ed page. Or, in some cases, what they run on Page 1.
Well, does the Times ever bother to wonder whether some of us also have newspaper experience? Or is that too much for them to comprehend?
Most of us aren't doing this to pay the bills. We're doing it as a counter to the relentless bias brought to us by outlets such as the Times. And over the past several years, those whom they dismiss as unpaid amateurs sure seem to break more news than established outfits.
Bloggers Do the Jobs
American "Professional Journalists" Won't Do
It's not that the Mainstream Media--The NYT is the poster child for floundering fishwraps--can't do their jobs.
It's that they have refused to do their jobs.
MSM news customers obviously have tired of paying for psuedo-intellectual socialist drivel masquerading as "news": Times' customers have deserted the paper in droves. In response to declining circulation, the NYT has continued the same policies; NYT customers have continued their exodus.
There's certainly a demand for liberal, left-leaning, pompous, arrogant, sniveling newspapers in America.
Not just a very big one, apparently.
It's noticed that the "professional journalists" hope to eventually finance their Internet operation by one of the Left's favorite funding mechanisms: foundation grants.
That figures.
When their journalistic enterprise fails to attract real, live paying customers, their impulse is to ask some foundation to pony up some money to insulate them from the effects of a marketplace that is a regular "professional journalist" whipping boy.
If the Ford Foundation can't spare a dime, maybe these Brave New Journalists can get in line for some bailout moolah.
In the Times' mind, it's the medium, not the message that's at fault.
We would disagree.
MSM "Professional journalists"--whether they're pounding the pavement in search of another gig or pounding the keys posting on the Internet--will likely have trouble attracting new customers. There's only so much demand for their product and it's more than met by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, TIME, Newsweek, NY and LA Times, MSNBC and the Washington Post.
MSM "professional journalists" on the Internet?
Not a lot to get excited about.
Really.
After all, paraphrasing the Times' Fab Fave 2008 candidate: you can put lipstick on the NY Times, but it's still the Times.
by Mondo
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