My favorite idea that came out of the Chicago Journalism Town Hall, held at the Allegro recently with about 350 in attendance, was beautiful in its simplicity. I am ashamed that I cannot recall who said it, but it was this: It would be stupid to buy a newspaper. The Trib? The Sun-Times? Hell, the Reader and its fellow papers?
In other words: journalism isn’t dying. (Journalists are dying, of course, but even I don’t blame the Huffington Post for that.) The institutions are dying. That’s it. We’ve isolated the problem!
There’s a fair amount of resentment about this, but there really isn’t anything you can do about it. James Warren will write for free, and he used to be managing editor at the Trib! You are not going to stuff that genie back in the bottle. That’s how the Reader started, by the way, so in some ways I am living off the spilled blood of 70s civic idealists who may not be that far removed from the traitors at ChuffPo.
It turns out writing is the easier thing to learn. It is the less valuable commodity.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This does not of course mean that journalists are useless, only that some of them are, and only fairly recently. Keep reading. I am not anywhere close to done.
When I hear the word aggregation, I reach for my revolver.
The aggregation/blog hybrid: Original content on one side, aggregation on the other. Huffington Post does this. Gapers Block does this. Talking Points Memo does this.
