"My quarrel with the blog world, to the extent I have one, is really with the zealots -- the people whose pose is revolutionary, whose articles of faith are that All Information Must Be Free (as if we should stop paying Dexter Filkins to risk his life in Iraq) and that Editing Is Evil (abolish those fact-checking departments and copy desks and let the Truth emerge organically from the collision of blogs) and so on. My anxiety about the blog world is not that it will put us out of business but that it contributes to an erosion of middle ground, that it accelerates a general polarization of the nation into people, right and left, who are ardently convinced and not very interested in exposing themselves to facts or ideas that contradict their prejudices."- New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, from an e-mail exchange with Jeff Jarvis. That the friggin’ top editor of the New York Times acknowledges that he reads and appreciates blogs –and that he takes time out of his busy schedule to send several long e-mails to Jarvis- should go a long way towards invalidating that whole “MSM is out of touch” argument, should it not? Posted by Stephen Silver at February 24, 2005 12:48 AM
Here we go again...whose side are you on Steve..join me in the chant...DIE BLOGGERS DIE!!!
Posted by: A at February 24, 2005 12:46 PMI'm not sure, Steve. I'm going to wait for Mr. Snitch to tell me what I should think.
Posted by: Emily at February 25, 2005 07:46 PM(Late to the party, but...)
Jarvis *is* "MSM", remember - he's been a reporter and magazine editor. So he has preexisting credibility there. I can't help wondering whether we'd see this collegial exchange if a mere blogger wrote to Keller in similar vein. I also can't help concluding that no, we wouldn't, although perhaps that's just me.
It also strikes me as rather clueless to assume as a matter of course that Dexter Filkins' reporting is more useful than that of the Fadhil brothers, Riverbend, and the guys at Kurdish Bloggers' Union, among many others. "Why, without newspapers, we wouldn't have any coverage of the bar of the Palestine Hotel!" If Filkins is risking his life, by all means pull him out of there - it's not remotely worth it.
(Now if he'd said "John Burns" instead of "Dexter Filkin", he'd have more of a point. But I'd still rather trust information from experts and/or people who live there than from people who are parachuted in with a reporter's level of knowledge, if I had to pick one or the other.)
Posted by: jaed at February 28, 2005 12:35 PM