{"id":12597,"date":"2007-08-20T10:35:39","date_gmt":"2007-08-20T14:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12597.html"},"modified":"2007-08-20T10:35:39","modified_gmt":"2007-08-20T14:35:39","slug":"skube-slips-in-slamming-scribes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/skube-slips-in-slamming-scribes\/","title":{"rendered":"Skube slips in slamming scribes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note one of the weekend’s more noteworthy thought pieces — Michael Skube’s 1,200-word take<\/a> on why he hates blogs. We’ve seen a few of these of late, but Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University, was unusually hostile to the medium. His argument, which is hardly without merit, is that quality journalism demands “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It’s not something one does as a hobby.”<\/p>\n

Bloggers now are everywhere among us, and no one asks if we don’t need more full-throated advocacy on the Internet. The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.<\/p>\n

And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. “No man but a blockhead,” the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, “ever wrote but for money.” Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers — Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post — are insistent partisans in political debate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, regrettably, is Skube’s lede, which sets a disappointing tone for the rest of the piece. Indeed, Skube highlights three elite professional bloggers, none of whom “write for free,” and points to the Huffington Post, which has a growing professional staff of paid political writers. In other words, the professor builds his thesis around a sloppy mistake, which Skube would have recognized if he’d taken a few minutes to better understand his topic before writing a diatribe for the LA Times. So much for “fact-checking, verification, and perseverance.”<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Josh Marshall exchanged emails<\/a> with Skube yesterday, and the professor explained that the reference to TPM in his op-ed came by way of an editor, and Skube had not, in fact, ever read Josh’s site — but he nevertheless signed off on the changes before his piece went to print.<\/p>\n

Let’s not brush over the irony of this too quickly. A journalism professor berated blogs for carelessness and lazy attacks, and approved of an op-ed column, published under his name, that criticized a news outlet he admittedly knows nothing about. As Josh concluded, “I grant you that the blogosphere needs better bloggers. But, as usual, the need for better critics seems even more acute.”
\n
\nNow, Skube has a broader point, of course, that also deserves attention — professional journalists at traditional news outlets are doing work that bloggers can’t. Here’s a radical response: yep, that’s true. But Skube’s point reflects added unfamiliarity with the subject. Who’s arguing that bloggers are going to replace the traditional media? A great deal of political blogging builds on reporting done by MSM outlets, adding details, context, analysis, and fact-checking to amplify the news.<\/p>\n

This is a discouraging development … why?<\/p>\n

Skube believes bloggers are sloppy amateurs. But should we really explore in detail the factual errors included regularly in the major dailies<\/a>? Or on Fox News? Or on talk radio?<\/p>\n

It’s not so much that I was angered by Skube’s op-ed, so much as I was disappointed in the professor for writing it. He blasted a medium he does not know or understand. He’s condemning writers he’s never read, and audiences he’s never spoken to.<\/p>\n

I don’t expect Skube to correct his errors, but I do hope he’ll take some time to read blogs and learn about what we’re doing. Perhaps he might even explore some substantive issues: Why are news consumers turning to blogs in large numbers? Why are we breaking stories traditional outlets overlook? Why is there a burgeoning professionalism in the blogosphere.<\/p>\n

Ideally, the professor would consider these points before writing an op-ed, but it’s not too late. Give us a shot, Prof. Skube, you might actually like what you find.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note one of the weekend’s more noteworthy thought pieces — Michael Skube’s 1,200-word take on why he hates blogs. We’ve seen a few of these of late, but Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University, was unusually hostile to the medium. His argument, which is hardly without merit, is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}