Went to the business section, and there was a huge photo of Sue Gardner.

Standard-issue, poorly cooked, half-heartedly researched WP "journalism".
Now they're quoting Joe Reagle as an "expert".

As usual, the comments are most entertaining …

"Encyclopedias are expensive books that only a select few families could afford."

Never ceases to amaze me this untruthful line espoused by supporters of wikipedia, particularly when purchasing a computer with monthly internet access, to read wikipedia is hardly free.

Journalism is dying. Oddly, it isn't the competition from free stuff online that is killing it, it is the bizarre laziness and low standards of journalists. Well, either I've gotten more critical or it has gotten noticeably worse in the last ten years.

Bizarrely lazy journalists with low standards would not have been allowed to survive 100 years ago. This is just Gresham's law of the jungle where the bad drives out the good when nobody gives a damn about quality. A century ago the newspaper was all we had for current events, and so we demanded more from it.

Like most bad problems, this is a cybernetic problem in which the feedback loop is not working well. There are few conseqences (or at least none that happen obviously and quickly) to getting crappy journalism. The consequences are probably dire, but it's like smoking or pollution: they're so far off that the system hasn't acted to fix them. Let the globe warm.

Say-- have you noticed that your body starts to fall apart after you've reached the age where you should have reproduced and seen your children through to adulthood? Yeah, me too. Evolutionarily, it's kind of the same thing as journalism going to hell. With no feedback mechanism, there's no almost no evolutionary pressure left for nature to make a better Sanger by age 42. Bummer. There's hardly a nasty problem on Earth that can't be traced to the problem of slow or bad feedback.

On the other hand, a certain amount of good feedback over billions of years, is why we're all here in the first place, complaining about it all. So there's that.

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winnaaaaar!



I agree, except that I consider journalism in the MSM to have been dead since at least 1994. If you will recall, that was the year of A Tale of Two Skaters, followed hard upon by l'affaire OJ. I cannot recall another time when journalistic laziness and obsession with celebrity was on more blatant or disgusting display. To the extent that anything has changed since, it has only gotten worse.

I suspect that the journalists are much the same as they have ever been, only less numerous. Where before they were by and large lazy and somewhat incompetent (like members of most professions, only more visibly), now they're lazy, somewhat incompetent, and overworked.

At least the journalist who wrote this article isn't a confessed plagiarist...a claim that some people around here cannot make.

That being said, the San Francisco Chronicle is among the worst daily newspapers in California. Whenever I am in the Bay Area, I only read the San Jose Mercury News. The San Francisco newspapers -- even the alternative weeklies -- are a true waste of paper and ink.

Maybe you are reading the wrong newspapers? There is plenty of great journalism still being published and broadcast. The problem is that the Internet has turned media into the digital equivalent of the amateur hour and broadcast TV news (at least in the USA) is so desperate for viewers that it promotes noise and attitude in lieu of content and objectivity.

Oh, I don't know...the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials was back in the 1920s and that was a pretty disgusting example of journalistic laziness and obsession with celebrity.

I don't know, newspapers will print anything these days without checking, including those that used to have a good reputation.

But it's rather the readers' fault. We keep buying those papers, for the sports pages.

Hell, when I am in London, I only read The Sun...but I don't get past page three!

Ah, yes. The Sun reminds one juuuust a little of Bomis, no? What Wikipedia needs is a page 3, so we'd know just what to expect, and no more and no less.

The colour of her hands in that shot makes her look like a compulsive hand washer.

Of course she is -- that ugly spider's still there.

Yes, I remember, that was the year we started watching increasingly more British and Canadian television just to escape the blitz. Of course, the CBC went to hell a few years after (with a lot of help from uno who) and the BBC eventually started putting a special Merkinized Edition for the US audience.

Where have you gone, Linda Ellerbee
A nation turns its leaden eyes to you
(Woo, woo, woo)

Jon

Do you listen to CBC radio at all? It's still mostly excellent (certainly compared to CBC television, or to commercial radio stations), but CBC TV has lost whatever justification it may once have had for taxpayer funding.

So true. It is Ellerbee who helpfully explains that the job of journalism is to explain what it personally does not understand. And that you can always tell when journalists have run out of sources and stories when they start reporting incestuously on each other and each other's publications.

For the last two years, has anybody noticed that MSN news has moved what used to be called "The Woman's Section" up their front page? If they put their sports news up there everybody would complain, but now we get stories targetted at another group of readers, who are not terribly interested in international events. I wish I'd been collecting story titles for the last week to illustrate some of this, but today's big headline is "The Best and Worst of the Golden Globes." I'm sure that addicts of Glee will be fascinated. Other main stories today:

Apple's Jobs takes medical leave (no, nothing about software or business)
Bank overcharged military families
10 stocks to watch this week (Okay, a legitimate front page story)
Manage menopause with your menu
Bing: Woman finds drugs in vacuum more soap opera
Find: Ohio State Stadium in Legos (For you arrested development people and your caregivers)
Bing: Burglar chased with a broom A story for witches, and not the Harry Potter kind.

It was; a truly disgusting episode in American history.

Used to listen to Radio Free Classical Music from Canada quite a lot, especially after the demise of Detroit's onetime excellent classical station, but then we got a new car with Sirius/XM … so of course they put a crummy antenna in it for anything that isn't satellite. Been meaning to get to some auto-audio shop to fix that … but life goes on in the shire …

You go, Durova!

I was referring to my own lifetime; Fatty was a bit before my time. No doubt, however, that Mr Arbuckle was the victim of a terrible injustice, so much so that the third jury that heard his case had a statement read out in open court saying so.

They're not looking at the MSM anyway. They're editing Wikipedia.