In this week’s column Gene Weingarten criticizes ONA’s annual conference (ONA11) held last month in Boston, asserting that the main message of the conference was around attracting reader eyeballs, ridiculing journalists’ focus on branding, and chastising the selection of Ben Huh as a keynote.
Now it’s our turn. Where do you stand in this debate? Give us your thoughts in comments/reblogs or submit your own response for publication on ONA Issues here.
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ONA Issues: Gene Weingarten criticizes ONA11, Ben Huh. WaPo asks: Was he right?
Let me come right out and say this at the beginning: I’m a big fan of The Fluff. Stories that some journalists typically deride as “fluff” are, in my view, the things that create the community around the tough stories.
The fact that Weingarten is willing to kill column inches on a conference that the readers have never heard of and wouldn’t go to if they had is symptomatic of the general failure of the news industry to pay attention to things that are actually important to the public at large. If Bob Niles is right when he says that every street protest is a failure of journalism then perhaps Weingarten should refrain from writing such columns and take the Metro to Occupy DC, or perhaps look into the rising cost of college.
Those “big issues” and fluff go hand in hand in another way: it has become increasingly hard for ordinary Americans to live — to have a job, someplace to live, enough security to consider starting a family or getting an education. Yet, many media organizations pay only scattershot attention to those issues, and at the same time express the most rank kind of snobbery about the kinds of things people who are having a hard day, one day after another with no hope of change — would like to see, hear and read as a way to cheer up and keep going in lives where they don’t get paid to write newspaper columns.
(via lifeandcode)
^ my hero
