Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: One source is stealing, two sources is research, no sources is blogging

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Mike Peterson Published: August 5, 2011 1 minute 2 comments

Today's La Cucaracha must be provoking some hearty laughter in Lalo Alcaraz's hometown of Los Angeles.

It used to be that the Wall Street Journal was noted in the industry for an editorial page filled with raging, rightwing opinion pieces based on information clearly contradicted in its own pages by its own independent news department. (I say "used to be" because I haven't read the WSJ regularly since Rupert Murdoch purchased it so can't confirm whether this is still the modus operandi there.)

Now we're in a new media world and there's a different form of journalistic schizophrenia out there: You see a link for what promises to be a particularly intriguing piece of political news leading to what you assume is the LA Times (because it says "LA Times") and follow it only to find that you've gone to an LA Times blog and there is no reason to take any of it seriously.

The LA Times blogs seem to operate on the theory that there's no reason why irresponsible, unsupported opinions should be confined to the on-line comments.

Or they may simply be following the HuffPost Rule, which is that it doesn't matter whether the headline matches the content or whether the content makes any sense, as long as you get people to click on the link.

Or who knows?

I was editor at a small paper where the owner/publisher announced that the key to success was to have everyone blog. Since he was also obsessed with story counts, and clearly didn't consider a blog entry to be part of that total, I became protective of my young staff, in large part because I was also under pressure to keep overtime to a minimum.

But, simple math and labor law aside, there's that word "young." When the topic came up at management meetings, I would ask "What should they blog about?" and the answer would be a cheerful, "Oh, anything they want!"

I was pretty sure I didn't want my twenty-somethings, much as I liked them, to be blogging about anything they wanted. I may be old, but I can remember what twenty-somethings want.

F'rinstance.

There was a second paper in the group,  and the boss was quite happy with how the young staff there — in contrast to my gang — had taken to blogging, one young woman in particular.

One of her blog entries was a breezy piece about how falling-down, curb-huggingly drunk she had gotten on her vacation in Mexico and what a great time it was.

Another was about Jehovah's Witnesses coming to her door and what morons people had to be to believe that the Bible was anything but a combination of nonsense, superstition and fairy tales.

I wasn't surprised that she wrote these things, but I was appalled to realize how little attention management, for all that it insisted everybody should blog, was paying to the actual on-line content that resulted, because her entries stayed up there for weeks before someone read them, gasped in horror and hit "Delete."

Thank god the web site was such an impenetrable dog's breakfast that the general public wasn't able to navigate it. (Nor was it set up to prevent ambitious young reporters from repeatedly clicking on their own blog entries, which not only boosted their stats but also helped obscure the fact that nobody else was visiting the site.)

The newspaper I was editing stopped production when the company, eager to prove the adage "Anybody can steer the ship in a still sea," quickly followed the tanking economy down the toilet. The other paper was purchased out of bankruptcy and now operates under new management.

It has no web presence.