Scripting News: A pro-media blind spot

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

A pro-media blind spot

Listening to this week's On The Media, they had a segment on cartoonists, and why it's so bad that we are losing so many of them as the newspaper industry shrinks. I like cartoons very much, but I was struck by something else in the piece. They were talking about cartoonists testing the limits of where they could go, and listed a bunch of topics that were taboo, and one of them was the publishers of newspapers. Then I remembered, a few years ago I was on a campaign to expose this blind spot, and got absolutely nowhere.

6/6/02: "If everyone says a journalist is really nice, I take that as a clear warning that this supposed journalist is actually playing footsy and selling out his readers. As readers, we have gotten very complacent about this."

My point then is that the media industry is enormously important to our economy and political system, but we have almost no visibility into how the money flows, and who makes the decisions. Only recently, as the industry has been firing reporters, have some of the editorial people had the guts to look at their bosses. And aside from interviewing reporters the rest of us have no way in there (and we know how reporters feel about bloggers).

This is just a reminder, there are a lot of places we don't look, but if we did, we'd see our strings being pulled all the time, in so many ways. Ever wonder who decides that we should get a steady diet of Anna Nicole Smith while World War III is breaking out in the Middle East? I do.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:37 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Mar May