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BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Gannett explodes the newsroom
BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Gannett explodes the newsroom
I haven’t been reading much Jeff Jarvis recently, but I used to be a big fan. I guess I might still be, but there’s a weird evangelical puritanical streak coming into some of his writing that makes it less enthusiastic endorsement of new technological possibilities and more technopolist ranting at anyone who dares challenge the new truths he has discovered.
This article comes somewhere close as does another recent one about Dean Baquet. It’s as though people’s jobs and livelihoods should count as nought before the inevitable engine of progress. As though any viewpoint that doesn’t embrace the new stuff is automatically wrong.
I’m all about new stuff, new possibilities but I think it’s really, really important to keep sceptics around me who’ll ask the questions about whether this stuff is really so new, really so great, really something we should embrace without looking behind us, which would be my instinctive reaction.
Just because you leave your job in frustration with how slow moving you think your industry is doesn’t mean that everyone who stays and sees the value in the old ways is wrong.
It reminds me of an article I read in the media guardian today where some editors of some newspaper, The Telegraph?, not sure were complaining about how their staff who voted to strike were Luddites. And I couldn’t help thinking it was kind of sad that the Luddites are still considered to have been stupid idiots with no point, when in fact their point about humans over technology was a valid one, even if it didn’t win the day.
One thing I fear is people who think we should embrace technology at all costs and who are so over-excited about it they can’t see how totally not new so much of its implications are. And I very much count myself among those people. But in many ways I am a fool. I just wish I knew all the ways, then I could avoid the many mistakes I’m bound to make in my life.
Last week or the week before in The Observer Euan Ferguson wrote quote someone talking about the “breathless enthusiasm” for new technologies (or maybe the idea that old media, or television or something, was dead) and he said we need to insert “ly minless” into that phrase. He was right. And I bet he’d hate being called right on a blog of all things, especially one that nobody reads, which is his least favourite kind, or the only kind as he sees it.
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