Earlier today I and a lot of other folks got an email from Vikki Porter, who's leading a Knight Digital Media Center conference for editorial page editors. "We are urging them to build credibility with their users by having the courage to send users elsewhere for info when they can't meet the need. As expected they are appalled. They want hard data to take home to convince their legacy managers this is a good idea."
Mallary Jean Tenore has a piece at Poynter.org titled Journalists Develop, Dismiss Digital Identities that includes the predictable "other side" in which a luddite just doesn't have the time.
In this case the luddite happens to be the "editor/opinion pages" of the Houston Chronicle. That's sad, because it's another example of failure to perceive opportunity.
"Digital identity" is just plain identity. Either people know who you are and what you stand for, or they don't.
In an op-ed for the big paper on the left coast, journalism professor Michael Skube complains that "the blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined."
"One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more," he writes.
As the bloodbath continues at America's big newspapers, name-brand columnists, movie and music reviewers are at the head of the line of those being thrown overboard. At my alma mater in the north, the Star Tribune, 25 percent of the news department and 40 percent of the editorial page are getting the axe. Many old friends are on that list.
While sitting under yet another a CNN Airport Channel monitor the other day, I listened to Lou Dobbs on one of his rants against illegal immigrants, which surely everyone knows is code language for Mexicans. As I listened to him exploit xenophobia for ratings points and book sales, I thought about Hitler.
But I decided I would not cross the line drawn by Godwin's Law. Not going there.
More fuel on the fire: Writing for the Nation, Eric Alterman asks if it's "time to abolish the editorial page."
