NY Times Public Editor grilled
Jack Shafer of Slate has some pretty strong words for the NY Times public editor:
The Public Editor as Duffer
The dreadful Byron Calame.
It’s worth a read if you have not followed Calame’s recent comments about the Gray Lady.
But I found this paragraph worth noting:
Calame’s bloodless performance convinces some (Timothy Noah for one) that the Times public editor slot should be scrapped. A generation ago, the job of beating the press fell to two journalism reviews, a few alternative newspaper columnists, and several hundred pressure groups. Today, says Noah, nobody who navigates to Romenesko or tours the blogs thinks of the press and the New York Times as underexamined institutions. Today’s posse includes not only press critics but the Shorensteins, the Annenbergs, the Pews, the Neimans, the Brookings, the Projects for Excellence, the journalism schools, not to mention the ideologically motivated watchdogs (Media Matters, Media Research Center, FAIR).
A current legion of bloggers and institutions (academic and otherwise) have really changed the landscape since 1995, when it was really just Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review as the watchdogs. When I was teaching at Columbia, CJR went from monthly to bi-monthly because of financial constraints. Today, bloggers and online news sites are commenting on newspaper editorials the night before they’re even published. In fact, today there is often too much media criticism to be digested in one 24 hour news cycle.
