July 8th, 2008
The Arrogance of Print
First, I love print media, though I work primarily in online. I also have tremendous respect for those people who are trying to figure out what the future holds for their businesses and careers. That said, to all the journalists and editors who’s only response to these looming changes is to grouse about how blogs suck and the olden days were awesome: please, shut the hell up.
The latest I’ve seen is an , Portland Tribune sportswriter.
What gets me is the tremendous arrogance of the “journalist” when it comes to their readers’ intelligence. In Eggers view, readers of sports journalism don’t know anything about sports and are easily hoodwinked by “unaccountable” bloggers. How silly does that sound?
If the job of the journalist is to inform, then wouldn’t it follow that the reader might learn something about the subject matter? Wouldn’t you become smarter and more discerning about what you’re reading?
Maybe — just maybe — sports readers are smart enough to take care of themselves when they venture off the path to read those scurrilous blogs.
The reason people read sports blogs in the first place is because they love sports. They can’t get enough of it, the nuances, the details, the sidelines chatter, the armchair managing. In fact, while Eggers decries some jounalist/bloggers for writing about peripheral things like “troubles with their rental cars” on their blogs, isn’t that exactly what fills up the pages of sports books (books that Eggers himself writes)?
Maybe if these old-school “journalists” got up off their asses and paid for regular, crappy seats at games, or god-forbid, watched the games on TV like the majority of us unwashed masses, they might rekindle the love of sports that first got them into the business.
Maybe then, they’ll remember what it was like to be fan, and stop treating us all like idiots.