The One Where I Use Way Too Many Similes

I’ve now read two chapters of We the Media and I’ve come to one inalienable conclusion: Dan Gillmor really knows his stuff.

While reading chapter two, I got this image in my head of him at his computer, rattling off the various forms the future of journalism will take from memory, probably licking his lips in anticipation.

The narrative thread throughout the first two chapters has been the evolution of the media from the lumbering dinosaur of the Hearst and Pulitzer days into the sleek cheetah of the decades to come. A cheetah that is easily accessed and to which anybody can contribute. A populist cheetah.

The rundown of the information-sharing forms Gillmor mentions read like a laundry list of the things I use when I go online, but I really have no clue what they do. I go on Wikipedia when I’m bored (but I don’t use it for research, like any good journalist). I partook in Napster back in the day. I even am now a card-carrying member of the blogosphere, thanks to this class.

I realize the implications these innovations will have on the future. I realize the sizeable impact they will have on my life as a journalist. I even sympathize with the guys typing in all the code to make all this possible.

But too often Gillmor seems like a public relations man, unwilling to consider any negative aspects of the “read-write web.”

I take that back. He spends one paragraph, buried near the end, explaining that these are just tools of journalism and “fairness, accuracy and thoroughness” must remain for its continued existence.

But then he goes on to envision a world where anyone can report the news without any help from what we know as mainstream media. This makes me wonder who is ensuring the fairness, accuracy and thoroughness Gillmor seeks. Surely not the guy with the camera phone taking an unflattering picture of a public figure and posting it on a message board. Or the guy using Photoshop to doctor a photo and push an agenda. If even professional photojournalists, people who could lose their livelihood over fixing pictures, do it, then what’s to stop an auto mechanic from New Jersey?

Andrew warned us in class last week about taking an all-or-nothing approach to the evolution of journalism. But it’s hard when we’re getting conflicting signals: conciliatory messages followed on the same page by revolutionary tracts.

I know my entries are starting to sound like the aristocrat arguing for the old ways as he’s led to the guillotine, but whatever happened to cautious optimism?

Every new thing is not the next big thing, especially in the world of electronics. Maybe I should dig up some eight-tracks and beta max tapes to prove my point.