Ghost of Midnight

… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum

Detaching from civic conversation

Posted on Thursday, February 10, 2011 by No comments yet

From Steve Yelvington today, responding to a question about contextualized journalism…

The unfortunate reality is that most of us who had the resources to take advantage of that opportunity have squandered it. Most of the journalism as practiced on the Internet fails to to take advantage of any of those capabilities. The writing is not significantly different from what you might have seen in 1955 — plain text, little use of media assets. Linking is rare. Incremental developments are not placed in context. What little “audience involvement” exists is limited to story comments left by angry, anonymous extremists. There is little actual interaction between journalist and audience, or with news sources.

I am very concerned that people are detaching themselves from the civic conversation, attracted away by bright shiny entertainment, driven away by poor reporting.

Posted in: Front Porch Forum


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *