Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice has one plea for this new year: can we perhaps lower the tone a bit this year?
The piece goes on in this vein. It's a nice idea, that people could tone down the rhetoric and try to find consensus on a few issues. I think eventually that will happen as people become tired of the shrill, vulgarity-strewn nastiness, particularly from lefty sites. They'll just stop visiting them and then they will either be gone or insignificant.
But what interested me more was this section of Gandelman's piece:
Can this incredible opportunity, seldom witnessed in the history of mankind, where people sitting at home can write, publish, edit and distribute their ideas at little cost and in milliseconds, start to realize its potential — by weblogs running more original reporting? Can weblogs truly become home-base for citizen journalists versus what most of them (including this one) are now: home bases to citizen op-ed writers or citizen political activists?
I think what might happen if this became the standard for blogs would be more, smaller, community-based blogs than what you have now. The strange part about what is out on the web now is that you have literally millions of people trying to discuss national issues because that is the way they build readership. This is sort of the opposite of the way newspapers worked, where they started local and then would expand their readership as they gained subscribers in far-flung places.
I'm sure there will be people who start doing more real reporting about things happening in their neighborhood, at the city council meetings, school boards, community events. But right now, it's much easier to find stories on the web and comment on them (such as this one, for instance). And there's a certain fascination with pointing out weird takes on other journalists' work, such as Amanda's take yesterday on the Jesse Green piece in the New York Times on Patricia Heaton. I, for one, love reading some of the perverse takes someone can have on a simple feature profile of an actress starting a new endeavor. It helps explain to me why anyone would vote Democrat. :)
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