Darrell Todd Maurina

Who Defines Journalistic Narcissism?

I like your post a great deal and have written my own commentary on it, though I realize I'm drawing conclusions that go beyond your intent.

pulaskicountyweb.com/s...

While the post-1920s professionalization of the news media through formal journalism training certainly had its advantages, homogenization of opinions certainly was not one of them. We professionalized legal training in the 1800s through the creation of law schools rather than "reading for the bar" through apprenticeships with already-practicing lawyers, but we certainly didn't make all lawyers into cookie-cutter conservatives or liberals.

So what went wrong with journalism schools?

Answering the "what," "why" and "how" of that question is less important than dealing with the massive change in access to information that is giving basically any competent reporter -- well-trained or otherwise -- access to as many people as want to read his (or her) website.

We're well on our way toward the free-for-all of journalism that happened in the 1800s and gave us newspaper wars and "yellow journalism." Long term, that's probably just a return to the way American politics have been conducted for most of our history until the last century, and especially the last half-century with only one newspaper in even our large cities. But short-term, it's going to create some major political uproars as people get used to everybody from Matt Drudge and NewsMax on the right to the Huffington Post and Daily Kos on the left being able to inject unfamiliar voices that wouldn't have made it through the gatekeepers of the traditional media.

That Whining You Hear Is the Death Wheeze of Newspapers

On Apr 07 05:24 PM Bobby Rifle wrote:

> Student2009, when are conservatives going to stop whining about "left
> of center slant" and start their own newspapers that have a right
> of center slant?

That's **FAR** harder than you may think, or at least it was until the collapse of print media and the rise of internet journalism.

I've spent 19 years in the working press, not counting college and grad school work. I'm a lifelong conservative Republican whose father became a Republican politician after he left the military and whose mother who was trained all the way back in the 1950s as one of the few women in Michigan State University's journalism school at the time. And I've seen lots of liberal bias firsthand from colleagues.

But the reality, until very recently, has been that freedom of the press belonged to those who owned a press, and starting a traditional print newspaper has been virtually impossible since the post-World War II era led to most cities having a monopoly daily newspaper. Monopolies grow big, fat and lazy, but when nobody else can get the capital to compete, they don't just survive, but thrive.

So far, left-of-center sites like Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Slate, and several other internet news sites are doing a much better job on the national level than conservative sites like TownHall.com, FreeRepublic, or NewsMax.com. Personally, I hope the collapse of the traditional print model leads to lots of local news websites from all over the political spectrum doing the work that needs to be done by **SOMEBODY** if local newspapers die -- and at the local level, the people who have an interest in business and marketing and entrepreneurship in general are much more likely to succeed.

I guess we'll see in ten years whether America is back to the model of the 1800s with a half dozen to a dozen news organizations from all over the political spectrum covering each mid-size to large city, or whether local reporting will collapse entirely. I suspect lots of out-of-work local journalists will figure out a way to stay in the news business, but I don't have a crystal ball that works any better than anyone else's.

I got out of a GateHouse Media newspaper on my own shortly before the company began its collapse, thanks to some local businesspeople outside Fort Leonard Wood who wanted to keep my work operating online and gave me the startup capital to begin the online-only Pulaski County Daily News (pulaskicountydaily.com). If this can be done in the middle of the rural Missouri Ozarks outside a large Army installation with its very young population and transient readership, I don't see why it can't be done a lot easier in a lot of other places.

A Paperless News World: Kinsley Nails It Again

I often agree with Jeff Jarvis, but I continue to be confused about this reliance on the "Baghdad Bureau" argument, as if there's something unique about military reporting that just can't be covered in a "new media" model.

I live and work outside Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, which is the home of the Army Engineer School, the Military Police School, and the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear School. For us, Iraq news **IS** local news. When I worked at the Waynesville Daily Guide, we arranged for a National Guard lieutenant colonel to write a weekly column for us while he was deployed to Iraq that was so popular it got picked up by the Missouri National Guard and distributed statewide to National Guard families and interested newspapers. Now that I'm running an independent news site at the Pulaski County Daily News (pulaskicountydaily.com), I'm arranging for an active-duty colonel who is about to deploy there in a senior leadership staff position to do a weekly interview with me. Frankly, I hope in a year to have made arrangements for somebody from every significant unit out of Fort Leonard Wood to be doing at least a weekly column for us. In an ideal world I'd like to have a mix of several people ranging from junior enlisted to senior officers, but I realize that takes time for trust to develop,

Is this perfect? Absolutely not. "Citizen journalism" has its limits. But anyone familiar with the Army knows that since most soldiers are young, many soldiers blog and use MySpace and other social networking sites, and they don't stop doing that when deployed.

A lot of the content is already out there and just needs to be made more available through news websites. That requires news reporters who are familiar with the Army and have the trust of soldiers (granted, that may be in short supply considering the anti-military attitudes of too many reporters). And we can be **VERY** sure that the al-Jazeera staff will do as good or better of a job in providing the other side of the story. For whatever reason, the Islamic fundamentalists have become quite adept at using the internet for their purposes.

Frankly, I just don't see the problem. Citizen journalism can be applied rather well to military reporting, and a lot of it is already going on -- it just isn't being noticed by the media because too many reporters don't understand the Army and too many soldiers have given up on the media. It's not perfect, but I'd rather have five less-than-perfect bloggers writing about what their Army battalion is doing than one reporter trying to cover five brigades. And I think that is different only in name and not in basic news model from some of the hyperlocal internet experiments going on in the New York metro area.

Another 'Great' Moment in AP History: Clueless Exec Unaware of AP's Own Video

Something about this doesn't make sense.

I have AP video on my online news website, the Pulaski County Daily News (pulaskicountydaily.com), which my webmaster found through Voxant/Newsroom. Since we are outside a major Army installation, Fort Leonard Wood, my webmaster also places feeds for video from a number of conservative-leaning sites like the Washington Times, NewsMax, and Human Events that are likely to interest military readers who want to see short summaries of national news that I can't possibly produce locally.

I recently ran into a regional Associated Press reporter based out of St. Louis when he was covering a story at Fort Leonard Wood with me that, in the past when I worked for the Waynesville Daily Guide, I would have sent to the Associated Press. I mentioned the AP video, which he didn't know about; he was seriously concerned, as I was, and he said he'd look into it. I assured him that if I was doing anything wrong, I'd be more than happy to do whatever it takes to fix the problem.

I also mentioned that down the road I'd love to become an AP member if I could buy only military-related content streams (which is the only thing AP offers that my readers outside a major Army installation can't easily get someplace else), and that I'd like to go back to doing what I used to do, namely, helping the Associated Press cover Fort Leonard Wood.

A couple of days later I got a call out of Kansas City explaining that they weren't aware of this new function that AP was offering, but as long as I got it through the Voxant/Newsroom service my webmaster is using, it was fine.

It sounds to me like what's happening is the Associated Press has introduced a new product that not everybody in their offices understands yet, and a polite and nice response from someone who would like to help add to the AP's coverage rather than attack them got a correspondingly polite response.

If You Can't Stand the Links, Get Off the Web

I'm a former Gatehouse reporter near Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri who now runs an online newspaper. I can't believe this lawsuit actually got filed. Here's my own opinion piece on the lawsuit:

pulaskicountyweb.com/s...

Darrell Todd Maurina
Pulaski County Daily News
pulaskicountydaily.com