All Blog Posts from Public Eye

We all know that journalism is going through some tough times – the “Goodbye To Newspapers” articles and doom-and-gloom polls are regular fodder for this space – but apparently so is journalism about journalism. (You still with me on this side of the rabbit hole?)

Howard Kurtz reports in today’s Washington Post that the American Journalism Review may be in its final days:

American Journalism Review, the influential but financially troubled media journal, could face a shutdown by year's end.
Tom Kunkel, the review's president, said it is "more likely" that the magazine will be able to continue publishing next year, but that he must close a deficit of roughly $200,000 -- about one-quarter of its annual budget…

He said there is "no guarantee" of survival but "we haven't been given a drop-dead date or anything like that."

This is less a story about the American Journalism Review’s failures -- they’ve consistently put out high-quality think pieces – than it is about the success story of today’s media criticism online.

The 21st century is about The Now, especially when it comes to the media. It’s thinking about what we're reading and living through and processing at the moment – sometimes superficially, sometimes more thoroughly, but always in The Now. We grapple with reporters in swimsuits working a story. We try to wrap our head around reporting from Baghdad. But we do it in real time.

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“We are a country at war and we have a presidential election coming up. And I’m the number one google search. I think it’s kind of ridiculous.”

-- Miss New Jersey and alleged blackmail victim Amy Polumbo, discussing her story on the "Today" show this morning. (It's around the 1:50 mark. You're welcome.)

It’s a saga that plays out on the media stage over and over, and over again with high-profile murder stories. And the coverage often follows the same rubric – explosive new information at every turn … only later followed by a dose of skepticism. The JonBenet Ramsey case -- revisiting the realm of intense public attention since news broke that John Mark Karr confessed to killing the young girl -- offers an obvious example, and critics have already been quick to point it out.

One popular critique making the rounds right now – and they are pouring out pretty quickly -- that the media was far too premature in accepting the latest information as the story’s final chapter...

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The New York Times has a circulation of a little over 1 million people. Based on the attention it gets from media critics, bloggers, and politicians, however, you could be forgiven for thinking that number was significantly higher.

Seemingly every word in the paper is parsed by both professional and self-styled media critics. Yesterday the popular media Web site Romenesko featured a piece from (my friend and former colleague) Gal Beckerman on how he doesn't trust the Times' coverage of the New York Times Company's "shareholder revolt." Romenesko also linked Staci Kramer's item on how the Times' Web site was down for four hours Wednesday evening "without even a cursory apology or explanation." (The nerve!) Meanwhile, bloggers continually parse everything printed in the paper in search of bias, inconsistency, or inaccuracy. When it comes to Times bashing, in fact, even politicians get in on the act.

There's no doubt that the Times remains an enormously important newspaper, in spite of the criticisms and crises it has had to weather in recent years. It helps set the agenda for newspapers around the country, radio and cable talking heads, and television news outlets both local and national, and it has a reach far beyond its subscribers. But one has to wonder if the scrutiny paid to the Times outweighs its influence. There's only so much scrutiny to go around, after all. And even if you think the Times deserves the close inspection it receives – you might recall that the New Republic just gave us a 4,000 word cover on the "Thursday Styles" section – it's not like this Times obsessing takes place in a vacuum. While media critics pore over the paper of record, vast swathes of the media universe go virtually ignored.

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Just like any subculture, people obsessed with the media have their regular stops on the web. Romenesko. CJR. The New York Observer. Editor & Publisher. The columns of Howard Kurtz and Jack Shafer and Jon Fine and others. Blogs like the NRO Media Blog and Pressthink. And all these are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg.



I've been reading these sites and others like them for years. And I have a theory: People who call themselves media critics, for the most part, think of themselves first and foremost as print media critics. They don't seem to have much interest in TV news or radio, at least from a journalistic perspective. (They do care about the Internet, of course, but usually for what they read, not what they watch or hear.)



When they do write about television, most critics tend to focus on the business side of things – the future of the nightly newscasts, for example. Or they zero in on television news personalities like Katie and Dan and Peter. When they write on print media, by contrast, media critics raise questions around the quality of the actual journalism – the content itself. This isn't true in all cases, of course. In a world as large and diverse as that of the media, there are bound to be numerous exceptions to every rule. But I think it's fair to say that, in general, media critics tend to cover TV news like they might show business. When they want to do work they consider more serious, on the other hand – the kind that makes them feel like they're engaged in a Serious and Important Enterprise – they turn to print.

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