Morning Ed: Media {2017.07.16.Su}
[M1] The Moscow Times (primary English-language paper of the city) is no longer running print editions.
[M2] Appalachia is getting a lot of attention, but is having to work to find its own voice amidst the various voices being assigned to it.
[M3] Joseph Bottum takes a look at Milo’s new book.
[M4] Heather Bryant writes about the media’s blue collar problem. It makes a fair amount of sense that as media jobs become more competitive with fewer to go around, and our media and culture become more national and hierarchial, we can expect the participants to be more and more well-heeled.
[M5] “Why haven’t they condemned this!” Maybe it’s because they never heard about it.
[M6] The writer who broke the Star of David at the Chicago Dyke March has been unceremoniously reassigned. {More}
[M7] When it comes to search engines and media outlets, it’s really not clear who should be paying whom.
[M8] For an industry that relies on communication, it’s really remarkable how tone-deaf some members of the media can be.
[M0]
Daily Mail here attempting the "but he has a black friend!" excuse for a 400-year, quarter-globe spanning empire. Nothing if not ambitious. pic.twitter.com/MGkPbMBR1l
— Katie (@supermathskid) July 7, 2017
M8: I don’t get it, possibly because I’m not a…Twit? Is that what they’re called? Anyway, Trump blocking her only means she can’t see Trump’s tweets, and vice-versa, right? How does it affect her interactions with anyone else? I assume it’s a given that Trump was never going to retweet anything she wrote, so that should be a non-issue. And since Trump’s account is presumably public, she can always read his in a private browser session.Report
The most (only?) tangible thing is that she is barred from this competition.Report
[M2] Looking at the 100 days website, I suspect that it’s liberal journalist Appalachians struggling to speak for all the rest who aren’t. But I might be mistaken.
You might find this interesting: KinAsthetics // Excommunicate me from the Church of Social Justice
Oh, and for [M6] you forgot the word “story”. You have her breaking the Star of David, which would be a good story in its own right, but is quite a different one.Report
I’ve read variations of that theme many times, and one common thread many of them have is a negative experience with dogmatic religious communities in their past (cults or just overbearing religious authority figures).
People who have escaped from one cult are keen to not repeat the experience.Report
M2: For better or worse, Appalachia has voices. I’m a Great Plains kid, a region larger geographically than Appalachia, where the population collapse has been on since the 1930s, the way of life is steadily disappearing, and it gets hardly any attention.Report
M0 – until the image fully loaded, I thought this was going to be a Star Wars thing.Report
M4 Back in the day, journalists didn’t always have degrees in journalism and weren’t generally considered white collar. Now you almost have to have a degree in journalism or something related (English, lit, etc) to be taken seriously. Perhaps the newsrooms should acquire some humility and start recruiting the blue collar perspective who happens to have an ability to write.Report
But, that could cheapen the perception of the current journalists. And like having low income housing move into your neighborhood, the current owners can’t stand the value drop.Report
My perception of most current journalists couldn’t be much lower.Report
My heart pumps purple piss for them.
Really, it does for anyone who decides their egos are more important than fixing something.Report
I’ve sat in a *LOT* of journalism classes, and I can tell you:
It’s the ones that don’t know anything else that go on to the newsrooms.
Those are the people with the least perspective to offer of the bunch.
The others go on to some better-paying field that is writing-intensive.
The odd irony is that we seem to have realistic expectations of becoming informed in some way from the most clueless of the lot to be had.
We would be a lot better off shucking the journalists and finding some reporters.
Papers used to have a way of developing writers into good reporters; starting them as runners, then occasional minor assignments, etc.
Enter Academia.
With four years of skoolin’, they figure, we can streamline this whole process.
An arrogant fantasy.
Then they trot out socially-conscious wordsmiths deeply involved in forming a narrative from illusion and ignorance.
And we are those who look to the clueless to guide us, to the most ignorant of the lot to tell us how things are, to the most naive in search of wisdom.
The sad part is we do so not in jest.
Academia is credentialed, and we place a lot of stock in credentials, even where it is readily apparent that credentialing had a large part in screwing things up in the first place.
Nothing like a good Sunday curmudgeonly rant.
Also, get off my lawn!Report
That Daily Mail article kind of goes against the Free Beacon observation that the Brits are masters of understatement, doesn’t it?
I do hate what the net has done for headlines though.Report
In media news, albeit the entertainment side, the BBC announced that Jodie Whittaker will be the thirteenth Doctor Who upon the departure of Capaldi in the 2017 Christmas Special.Report
This will mark the second time I am older than the actor playing the Doctor.Report
Capaldi is the only one of the new batch that has been older than me. (And not by a lot. We would have been in HS at the same time.)Report
@saul-degraw
Same for me, though only by a month in my case.Report
Someone pointed this out to me on the twitters and I thought that it was worth sharing here.
A simple article that discussed a notice for a job opening for German Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She added some emphasis, I’ll add the same emphasis, but you should read her article for the rant she has attached.
The help wanted part (keeping his emphases) follows:
Warning, I guess: the rant contains salty language.Report
I don’t know whether to be insulted for qualified candidates, or pity them.Report
Let’s get H1-Bs into the University!Report
Clearly the American academic system has decided it wishes to return to the days of gentleman academics, where faculty is all independently wealthy and only on staff as a sideline because they are bored.Report