The fine (particularly recently) Conover on Media once characterized your correspondent as "annoyingly ahead of her time" - and it is extremely apt, at least when "out to lunch" isn't more so.
And I just realized another way that it fits -
I've been reading Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero interview with Christopher Anderson of NYC Indymedia, and they're discussing what motivates citizen journalists; and reading between the spoken lines, it's pretty clear that Anderson thinks it has to be political passion, and is a bit dubious about the prognosis for (Assignment Zero parent) NewAssignment.net's brand of citizen journalism:
Are there enough people in the world who care about journalism (not political journalism, or journalism motivated by politics) to create something more ... god, I hate the word "objective," but something less ... partisan? Just because they care about good journalism?
and put that way, it does sound...how shall we say it...off the beaten track...
...and also oddly reminiscent of a certain Assignment Zero contributor's profile:
Joined because: I want to help make crowdsourced journalism work. The reason - I want to see better journalism, and part of better journalism is more diverse journalism - one form may illuminate the blind spots of another. And the blind spots of our current journalism badly need sunlight.
Why would anyone care about "journalism" enough to go out and do it themselves, when they could just pick up their city's paper and read the news they needed to know?
?
But what if it's 10 years down the road, and your city no longer has a paper covering the news, or watchdogging local government? How much do you value journalism then? How will you get it?
I suspect I'm only ahead of the beaten track.
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