In a way it’s been kind of satisfying watching Jeff Jarvis’s reaction to my criticism of him. After all, he’s made it a point of pride to callously dismiss the crushed hopes of whole families of journalists thrown out of work because consultants like him give management a fig leaf to downsize, fire top notch journalists in order to follow little Jeffy (as I think he must be called from now on) and turn their papers into “hyperlocal” scab sheets, hyperlocal being little Jeffy’s jargon for the Pennysavers he thinks are the future of newspapers. (what an inspired visionary!)
As one media figure said in an e mail about his constant crybabyism over my criticism–in addition his refusal to answer its gist: “you’ve clearly driven him crazy and it’s fun to watch”. That’s a little cruel, but my whole point in my original critique was that Jarvis was cruel and callous in denigrating the journalists who have been fired in the current crisis. Hardworking journalists who used years of skills and experience to do important jobs that Jarvis, with his “hyperlocal” mentality thinks can taken over by, in effect, no-skill scabs who will work for free.
Frankly it’s the people on the business side who should be fired and replaced by Jarvis’s “pro-am” types who couldn’t have done a worse job than those who failed in their calling and blamed their own incompetence on the workers they fired.
Sam Zell! The bankrupt prophet of Jarvisism. Isn’t it a little obvious now that if morons like Sam Zell hadn’t fired some of the best most experienced journalists at the Chicago Tribune we would have learned a lot more about Governor Rod and his corrupt operation before the election. Not that it would have, or should have, affected the election–so far there’s no indication Obama was involved in Rod’s corruption–but that’s what skilled journalists–the kind Zell fired with the encouragement of his court clown Lee Abrams (neither of whom had the slightest notion of what journalism is) did on their merry road to bankruptcy (using workers pensions funds to finance their folly.)
I think it’s time for Jarvis, who sadly has become the public face of a start up J-school at the once-proud City University of New York to publish a Bill Clinton-like list of his clientele so we’ll know who the Zells in his menagerie are. By the way I attempted to get the CUNY J-school dean, a man I have great respect for, to answer a simple hypothetical question: if, when, he had been editing a business magazine and a reporter assigned by him to write about, say, IBM, had come in and told him that he had no intention of speaking to anyone at IBM, but planned to do the story by “reverse engineering” it ala Jarvis–substituting his own speculations about IBM from the outside–how would the dean, as editor, have reacted. And whether he thought this “method” of “journalism” was what he wanted taught to students at CUNY. The dean just wouldn’t answer the question I asked. I don’t blame him for evidently being too embarassed to defend Jarvis’s methods, but it’s sad Jarvis has put him in that position.
I told the dean, in our exchange of e-mails, that I pitied the students there if that was what they were taught as “journalism”. But if you listen to Jarvis you know who deserves pity? Not the students, not the families of the legitimate journalists fired in the webification of journalism. But rather poor little Jeffy who’s run to mommy and daddy because he can’t take criticism. Isn’t he supposed to be an advocate of vigorous blogosheric disputation? Except when it comes to him, then time to run to mommy.
What are we to make of this, something as far as I know absolutely unheard of in polemical arguments, print or blog: instead of defending your positions you run to mama and dada. I think it can be seen as the equivalent of Jarvis declaring (intellectual) bankruptcy. He can’t defend his shoddy fire-the-workers ideas so he has to revert to “telling” on his opponent to his parents. It reminds me of one of those little kids in grade school who informed on pranksters to teacher.
Amazing, this is his idea of argumentation? Someone who accused me of “third grade” tactics, has regressed under attack to the old kindergarten strategy: WAAAH!
When I told a friend about this and how, of course I felt bad that Jarvis would need to drag his poor innocent and no doubt worthy parents into the fray, presumably because he lacked the means to defend himself without an appeal to pity, my friend advised me not to feel bad for Jarvis’s self-pity attack. “You should just respond by telling Jeff’s parents that you’re sure they’re not responsible for their son’s behavior, you have no doubt they raised him with all the care and wise guidance that any child could hope for. That it wasn’t their fault that he turned out to be so heartless. Sometimes it happens, people with the very best upbringing and the most sterling parents just behave in a callous way you could not predict from their childhood upbringing. It shouldn’t reflect on his parents, despite poor Jeff trying to make them front for him.” (Nor should his idea of”journalism” reflect on the dean and students of the j-school he’s attached himself to). Perhaps he will think back and re learn the lessons of empathy and human kindess his parents undoubtedly taught him long long ago.
Now for Jarvis’s other supporters. One thing I notice in common about the commenters–the ones I’ve had time to read–who support Jeff Jarvis is how ignorant, abusive and barely literate most of them are. Kinda contradicts Jarvis’s claims about “the wisdom of the crowd” Not much wisdom in his crowd
First – can we dispose of this meme that I’m somehow “jealous” of Jarvis’ work, or that I’m just a envious unemployed journalist?
Sigh. I will put this on the record just so I won’t have to deal with the people who can’t get a clue from the blog, the books on it, and its contents: I’ve published seven books, one a NY Times bestseller, the others widely praised. Jarvis: well, he has one on the way, the “reverse engineering of Google” book. I have four volumes of my journalism and essays collected in books. Jarvis who brags about his “clips” has no such books I know of, no one is interested in collecting his journalism. Because no one paid any attention to him as a writer, no one paid much attention to him at all, before he started to pose as a theoretician and j-school eductator and saw how profitable it could be attacking real journalists. (I have, by the way, taught writing at Columbia and NYU j-schools as well as the University of Chicago. Jarvis teaches at a start-up j-school, most of whose faculty must be horrified by his anti-journalism journalism and the way the Jarvis tail, so to speak is allowed to wag the j-school dog.
Nor am I without current work: I have contracts for two new books, a well-read online column and a blog. Nothing special about any of this but jealousy of JJ? I think not.
I consider myself fortunate and when one is fortunate it’s almost a duty to reprove others who are using their good fortune to deride and degrade their betters at journalism (or anything) who’ve fallen on hard times. Instead Jarvis, our contemporary Mr. Gradgrind (have you read Dickens’ Hard Times Jeff—do you read anything by anyone but your fellow “futurists”?) sneers like Gradgrind or Scrooge at the plight of reorters and families hurt at Christmastime by layoffs. It’s their own fault, our Mr. Gradgrind tells them. And then runs to mommy when he gets criticized for heartlessness
But I can see now how he’s shewdly exploited his link with Limbaugh-like, right-wing dissatisfaction with the media to bash all journalists regardless of their merits or ideology. Well, Jeff, you’re known by the company you keep. Thankfully as one new media head told me, my critique of Jarvis seems to have been a tipping point, making people take a closer look and recognize how empty his “new ideas” are.
Yes there are problems with the media, with media responsiblity, media bias, with media economic models, but Jarvis is too busy sucking up to the corporate side—whose inefficiences and ineptness are most responsible for the problems–to offer any real solutions aside from turning into once-valuable newspapers into “hyperlocal” pennysavers. Instead he takes the consultant fee paychecks that, in effect, out of the mouths of the families his denigration of workers his kind of advice gets fired and sneers at those whose work has more honor than his ever will amount to in a million years of Dubai “summits”.
The abusiveness of Jarvis’s supporters makes sense though, because I’ve gotten report after report about how arrogant and abusive Jarvis himself is when he makes comments on others’ blogs in response to the mildest criticism. He’s the type who can give it out, but can’t take it. Instead he hides behind mommy and daddy so he can boo-hoo and avoid an adult response.
We need futurists, but all you corporations who are looking to JJ to tell them the future: really you can do better with a grown up who actually knows what journalism is.
I’m not familiar with the history of this so I apologize if some of this has been said already.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Jarvis next points to the market as a defense. He’s getting paid while real journalists aren’t, therefore, the market has dictated that he is right.
The problem with that argument is something alluded to above. That is, the business end of journalism is what has failed, not the journalists themselves. It’s unfortunate that these same business managers are in a position to fire the journalists and blame them for the failure. But any reasonably conscious observer can tell that people didn’t quit buying newspapers because the news in them was deficient, but because everything else about the newspapers was. From the production to the distribution and the revenue stream, newspapers have failed even though some (increasingly fewer) of them delivered a superior product, better journalism.
Now, in the face of their own failures to adapt their business models to technology, media business managers are grasping at straws in an attempt to salvage their job titles. It’s no surprise that they’d try to co-opt the very product that made their incompetency so glaring. Music industry execs have been trying to do the same thing for a few years. Made obsolete by the internet, they keep trying to claim ownership and profit from the same online distribution streams that made them obsolete in the first place. In both cases, the folks who actually produce a product, musicians and journalists, end up paying the price.
Comparing the two industries, music and news, actually provides a pretty interesting perspective. Not only have the ‘artists’ (musicians and journalists) been let down by the failures of distributors and managers to adapt to the internet, but the competition that defeated them was a swarm of amateurs in the form of garage-bands and bloggers enjoying the free exposure the internet granted them. Of course, that’s also a key difference. While many of those garage-bands were actually as good or better than the under-contract MTV bands they were supplanting, most news bloggers are untrained, unskilled and sloppy. Like Jarvis.
The internet, by killing the old distribution models, has given us a chance to experience so many more of the excellent unsigned musicians and writers in the world. But it’s also raised our exposure to a mass of awful wannabes and hacks. For every great new band or writer to appear on myspace or blogspot, there are hundreds of terrible ones. This isn’t a bad thing. A discerning audience can always find the better bands and the better news sources even if the industry is constantly marketing to the lowest common denominator of demographic audience. But the social consequences of that lowest common denominator listening to bad music is nothing compared to the effects of such bad journalism. The world survived the Spice Girls relatively unscathed, but yellow journalism, propaganda and misinformation have left some pretty nasty scars.
We need to save the good, responsible and honest journalism that has been evolving in our society for hundreds of years, not replace with the flavor of the month because of bad business decisions. While the music execs might have been a little justified in blaming the contract musicians for their failure to sell CDs, the news execs have nobody but themselves to blame for failing to sell newspapers.
Man, what a juvenile – and tedious – pissing contest…
You guys gotta be kidding. What is a “real, professional journalist” to you? Let me tell you what one is to me: A biased, ill-read, purblind shill for whatever he or she agrees with, working for an organization without scruple when it comes to sensationalizing, distorting, or flat out ignoring the truth if they find it disagreeable or it means they can grab a few more eyeballs for their paid advertising. Objective, unbiased, thoughtful analysis is completely beyond their ability and/or desire. You have got to be joking when you say that the Chicago Tribune missed the Gov Blago story because their “competent” journo’s got laid off. It was not covered so it wouldn’t splash any mud on Barack Obama during the presidential campaign. Corruption in Illinois politics is and has been rampant and endemic for decades right under the noses of your pitiful, out of work “journalists”.
Please don’t confuse my harshness as support for this Jeff Jarvis character (no idea who he is). He sounds like a real preening “everything is different now and I saw it first” weenie. However, before you get your “real journalist” ego too blown up, tell me how it matters if you interview Google or IBM management (to use your examples) and then selectively edit their responses, take phrases out of context, shoot them in unflattering light, recut questions and answers, and put words in their mouth? Who’s the better journalist then? If you honestly conducted the interview and made the full original source available and produced a thoughtful analysis then I would say your argument holds water (unfortunately you’d never get the resulting piece broadcast or published). In those circumstances, since “real journalism” can’t be (or won’t be) done anymore, maybe the reader has a better shot at a true picture by a random sampling of outside (expert & otherwise) opinion.
Think about it, Ace. Jeff Jarvis may really be a shallow, self-promoting idiot, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile. He might just be on to something about fact gathering in the modern internet age. My blog pseudonym was coined after reading what a “real journalist” wrote about a subject I happened to have direct experience with. How do you think he did?
Sorry Ron but you’ve been a journalist too long if you think the major problem with journalism today is the corporate ownership. The major problem with journalism today is the it spends all it’s time attacking the same boogeymen (conservatives) and excusing and covering up the worst excesses of it’s hero’s (Democrats).
For instance your aside about Blago and Obama and what may have been reported if the Tribune hadn’t fired a bunch of journalists. I’ve got news for you Ron, if they didn’t fire those journalists they would have just had more stories about how great Obama is. There are plenty enough journalists at the Tribune or the LA Times or wherever to have reported on Obama’s ties to the Chicago political machine. They just didn’t want to. As far as I’m concerned having 20,000 journalists sucking up to Democrats and swooning over Obama is much better than having 40,000 doing it and if I was in corporate I’d probably figure it would be cheaper too.
So excuse me if I laugh everytime I read about more newsroom lay-off’s and some journalist tries to blame it on corporate. Sorry guy but corporate doesn’t right the boring, one-track yellow journalism crap that spews from the MSM these days.
Thanks for the laugh though Ron, your last few paragraphs are hysterical. “good, responsible and honest journalism”, that’s rich man.
Tell it to the Joads
For the record guys, try to separate my purile, uninformed comments from Ron’s. Cheers!
What Rosenbaum doesn’t understand is that sophisticated blog readers had deserted Jarvis (a monumental bore) years ago. What Jarvis has to say about new media – and alas Rosenbaum’s response – is tedious and irrelevant.
The journalists deserve every bit as much criticism as that which is heaped on the business side. I follow civil liberties and corruption issues, and were it not for people like Radley Balko who is a blogger who is damn near a journalist on the side, a lot of the information would fall through the cracks because the local media couldn’t be less interested. There are often a lot of stories that happen in modest sized jurisdictions that the media could blow wide open–and be civically responsible at the same time. Yet, they don’t because they are often too busy chasing the conservative-libertarian boogeyman that another commenter pointed out.
Both sides are made for one another. Jarvis sounds like a tool with respect to his book on Google (it sounds like a hit piece a la Naomi Klein’s libelous tome about Milton Friedman), but he is justified in experiencing schadenfreude when discussing the fate of much of the mainstream media.
I am another who stepped into this debate just now. I have no real stake in things, other than to comment that using one’s mother to defend yourself against a critical article is a bit unfair, to say the least. I also was amused that Mom didn’t know who Ron Rosenbaum was, but knew her son (of course). I, on the other hand, know who Ron is (Explaining Hitler was a very good book) and have no clue who this Jarvis character is. I had to think just a minute when I wrote his name; I’d already forgotten it. I expect I’ll never hear of him again, thankfully.
I haven’t read much worth reading from Jarvis in a while (take that for what it’s worth, life’s to short to regularly read anyone who bores me), but ditto on commenters above.
The problem with journalism is that too many journalists are advocates willing to arrange the facts to fit a predetermined story line. They don’t want us to draw our own conclusions, they want us to draw their conclusions.
Personally, I don’t “callously dismiss the crushed hopes of whole families of journalists thrown out of work”.
I grin with glee and schadenfreude. The more of these worthless left-wing parasites who are forced out to seek honest jobs, the better for society.
Two of my favourite websites are Reflections of a Newsosaur and AngryJournalist. They never fail to cheer me up.
If, as you claim, Jeff Jarvis is contributing to the fall of the corrupt institution of jpurnalism, then more power to him!
I am a big fan of Ron Rosenbaum. Why, I wonder, is he devoting an atom bomb to annihilating a flea? Ron, get a grip. It’s not worth the intellectual and emotional expenditure.
Your original critique is a shining example of the type of distorted reporting pointed out by “Staring in Disbelief” above.
Few of the quotes show what you claim, and they are presented in a slanted, snotty, tendentious style. I for one look forward to the demise of the self-appointed gate keepers who know better than us what we should know, and what we don’t need to know. And their “suffering families” too!
It is presently my intention to, from here forward, present the words “journalist” or “journalism” in quotes. Ain’t what they used to be, and there’s no telling what they actually are.
Mr Rosenbaum obviously knows what journalism should be, and yet we see that it doesn’t really matter whether he does on not. As Rome burns, “the media” bred journalists focus on who screwed up the secret handshake at the last fraternity meeting. After decades of training, those within the Profession Formally Known as Journalism seem incapable of seperating what is important within their own frat house from what is important to the mass of those they hope to reach.
Now, on to another article about “The One” looking good in Hawaii. (Hawaii is so much nicer this time of year than, say, Chicago where they have all that corruption and bad weather. Don’t you think?)
have a nice day
Ron, are you seriously arguing that the editorial side has no culpability in the newspaper business collapse?
What an odd use of Pajamas Media: a rousing defense of traditional journalism, and in case that’s not enough, a call to pity those poor reporters and their families (at Christmastime!). I half feel that Charles or Roger need to come in here and pull a Palmieri. And the part where Rosenbaum goes all Glenn Greenwald with his resume was extra special.
Jarvis makes his living being a well-compensated consultant to old-line MSM newspapers like the Newark Star-Ledger, which has taken the route of destroying its own franchise while terrorizing its employees. This charlatan even has the chutzpah to nod knowingly while his online idiots go on at length about how lousy the Ledger’s website (NJ.com) is, while never copping to the fact that he was the consultant who designed it in the first place. He is beneath contempt, no matter what anyone may believe about the cosmic merit (or lack of it) of journalists.
Yeah, right! The Trib “journalists” would have exposed Blago’s activities! And I have some ocean front property to sell you in New Mexico, with private beach rights, for real cheap!
Wah wah, blah, blah. I’m amazed that journalists allow vultures and cretins to control this narrative. How many of you have ever met a journalist? Ever worked as one? Ever known one? Jesus, most of your knowledge of an industry seems to be informed entirely by cop dramas and tired stereotypes.
I’m amazed that newspapers allow vultures and cretins to do journalism. But the failure of the news industry is the inevitable outcome of that choice.
The more the readers know about journalists, the less they trust them.
The business end of journalism has failed, that’s true. The way people use media has changed. But to claim that’s the only reason for the failure is typical of the people still in the field.
I’ve worked in the newspaper business for close to 30 years, and very closely with journalists. I’ve seen the decline in character and skill of journalists. Most are activists now. Generations coming up in the business are increasingly incurious. They have poor critical thinking skills, have no basic knowledge of history or civics. They ARE quick to omit for the convenience of making a story fit an agenda and slow to recognize their own bias.
I’m not saying there were none interested in learning and working to get it right. But the vast majority contributed to the sorry state of their own vocation.
I would love to pick up a NYT and read it as I did years ago, but there is not much learning or pleasure from it anymore. Blame the failure on the business end if you like, but to deny that journalists are not part in their own demise is telling.
Mel Michaelson – “Wah wah, blah, blah. I’m amazed that journalists allow vultures and cretins to control this narrative. How many of you have ever met a journalist?”
I’ve known a few even though most of them are now retired or gone from this world. I also have a cousin who is prominent in the business. It’s talking with people in the field that has led me to believe that if a journalist has no integrity, whatever else they have isn’t important.
The articles on this topic actually remind me of an old “Spy vs Spy” comic from Mad Magazine. Were it not for the fact that I do have some respect for Mr Rosenbaum, I’d think it was just vultures fighting over the corpse of the aviary keeper who bred them and raised them on the corpses of those he slew for cheap thrills.
Regards