Want to read some great journalism, important reporting, and insightful…er…insight (where’s my thesaurus)? Vermont’s traditional journalism pioneers Jon Margolis and Anne Galloway both make tremendous contributions this week. Margolis has a piece near-and-dear to my heart as it reflects a longtime GMD theme. Here’s Margolis:
In many states, as well as on the federal level, committees of the legislature or Congress can and do investigate the workings of the executive branch… by both culture and law, Vermont’s legislature appears to be one of the weakest in the country in its capacity to find out about what’s going on in the executive branch, much less to monitor it or to probe into possible incompetence or misconduct.
Galloway’s vtdigger has broken out the very anatomy (as she says) of the story Jack broke and has followed (the closing of the VSH Canteen) and in the process illustrates just how inefficient, confused, wasteful and arbitrary the Douglas administration is when it comes to handling taxpayer dollars:
(Secretary of the Agency of Health and Human Services Rob Hofmann) says closing the Canteen will save $100,000 next year, and he says this is a sizeable budget item in light of the administration’s call for 8 percent across-the-board cuts…
[…] Last Friday, DMH closed the Canteen. On Monday, DMH moved into its newly renovated office space at nearby Wasson Hall, which features new windows, repointed brick and interior renovations. The three-story structure is also getting a new slate roof… The price tag is $2.5 million, not including $47,000 for new hardwood furniture purchased from the Vermont Offender Work Program and a $33,000 contract…
And if that’s not enough…
Memos from the Department of Mental Health show that officials didn’t assess the impact of closing the Canteen on Vermont State Hospital patients until nearly a month after the decision to shut down the snack bar was finalized.
Veteran journalist Margolis is a one man act, and has already become a must read. The more ambitious news site vtdigger is Galloway’s nonprofit e-news endeavor, and it’s profile is growing in leaps and bounds. It won’t be long before the Times Argus rues the day it ever let her go. Both also are looking for online contributions to support what they do, and it would behoove folks with extra cash to help them out to keep this ball rolling. They are building new journalism models from the bottom up, which is what its likely going to take to save journalism, as opposed to simply retrofitting more traditional business models.
Both Margolis and Galloway were recently guests on Mark Johnson’s show as well. The complete podcast can be found here at Johnson’s site. One of the more interesting parts of the discussion (well, to me at least…) came when GMD’s Maggie Gundersen phoned in and spoke of her experience as a member of the “legacy media,” which also provided an opportunity to segue into a discussion of blogs in general.
Both Margolis and Galloway to large extent “get it” that blogs and new media sites are something different, something meaningful and not to be feared. They also have a sense of what traditional media practitioners sometimes do to fuel the new media fire – specifically the tendency to create false dualities to give the appearence of being evenhanded.
There is still some oversimplification at play, though. Suggestions (it may not be in the excerpted portion below) that journalists have to stay somehow in between the political ideological poles walk a bit close to the notion that good journalists have to either have no opinions, or must only be political centrists. You also hear some oversimplification in the false equivalence between GMD and VT Tiger, simply because one is “left” and one is “right” and both use the medium of the world wide web. I daresay there is no left wing equivalent to VT Tiger in Vermont, as there is no right wing equivalent to GMD. The two sites are very different in goals, approaches, functionality, and everything in between.
But it’s still great stuff, and that 6-minute-or-so segment is excerpted at this link (dang thing won’t embed right):
With regard to the audio clip, I would just have to say that, while the example Maggie cited of a profoundly biased paper may be relatively rare, I think we know full-well that pretty much all print papers have a consistent bias. The best of the dailies manage to maintain a facade of balance in the eyes of their general readership; but the bias is exercised subtly (or not so subtly) in material selection.
At least this is my impression as purely a consumer of journalistic products.
It worries me that the factual edges of journalism are getting a little blurred in some people’s minds by the confusion of media choices. Those of us in the generation who grew-up watching Walter Cronkite can be especially vulnerable to “indiscriminate belief.” That may be one of the reasons the tea-baggers, aided by Fox “News,” have been so successful in stirring up primarily older Americans against what should be a very popular alternative to the current healthcare situation. Younger media users may have skepticism hard-wired into them as they have learned to navigate through a cacophony of competing viewpoints in order to form their own opinion of what is “true.” The downside is that cynical apathy is often a bi-product of youthful skepticism.
Do you think sites such as Vtdigger will replace newspapers such as the times-argus or the freeps at some point down the road? Am beginning to think so.
This April in a VPR radio lament called Telling Stories in Print the Rutland Herald’s David Moats commented
Some people here in Vermont are imagining and inventing future journalism I hope David Moats gets online and looks at Vermont News Guy and Vermont Digger.Maybe he could do a commentary on their efforts, I haven’t read anything about them in the local papers yet.
http://www.vpr.net/episode/45780/
In the Mark Johnson Show interview Margolis insisted that he was trying to be part of some mythical neutral observer press. I called in to argue the opposite as in my view history has shown the United States ‘press’ to be fraught with an absolute lack of neutrality (my favorite example being Ben Franklin writing letters under a pseudonym disparaging his political opponents to Franklin’s own papers).
Today’s posting from Margolis carries these two paragraphs towards the end:
(Overlooking Oversight II, Vermont News Guy, 12/14/09)
Both these paragraphs are shot through with unsupported assertion, opinion and political slant.
I like Margolis’ site. I just don’t think he should be laying claim to pretensions that are demonstrably false.
If we understand there is no such beast as a neutral press, we can learn how to interpret and question what we read.
It is an interesting thought on what would happen if the traditional print media became extinct because of the digital age.