Perhaps the Strangest Article I Have Read, Ever (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)
Howell Raines on Jim Romanesko:
Jim Romenesko's Impact on Journalism: How the first media gossip site inadvertently ushered in the era of fact-free journalism: [We] ink-stained traditionalists... were aflutter about Poynter['s]... nervy decision to hire an obscure gossip blogger... on Poynter’s dignified website....
[T]he famously reclusive blogger... cloistered digital monk... a true obsessive... a lonely-guy existence....
[D]isgruntled newsies... quickly discovered that by having Romenesko post their internal memos they could manipulate their bosses... the late Gerald Boyd and I... were among the first to get Romenesko’d out of our jobs.... I never really blamed the messenger.... [M]any editors [do],... grousing that Romenesko’s blog at poynter.org feeds gloom and doom in the nation’s newsrooms... a high-tech tom-tom for angst-ridden members of a dying tribe....
Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product--verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko’s rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information... it’s not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information....
I’m not sure Romenesko has yet grasped that the informational storm he unleashed a decade ago is already undermining his prominence.... Romenesko is Poynter’s highest-paid nonexecutive employee, at more than $170,000 a year....
[But] Gawker now reaches an audience several times larger than Romenesko’s and has paid backhanded tributes to “mild-mannered Jim Romenesko, who runs the most feared blog in journalism (except for this one).”... [I]ts readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. “I don’t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn’t directly relate to me,” says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper.... “Romenesko... provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry--an invaluable tool for that master’s thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper.”...
The swift rise and incipient eclipse of Romenesko illustrates what a quick trip it is from guru to geezer in cyberspace... the Manhattan buzz is that Gawker too has already peaked. Traditionalist critics view Romenesko as the guy who opened the first and biggest hole in the sacred wall between news and gossip in reporting about the media. The newer media blogs, however, see him as being confined by passé, self-imposed rules, such as his steady refusal to make his own website into a political soapbox and post the most extreme commentators from the alternative press....
Yellow journalism begat objective journalism, which begat investigative journalism, which begat advocacy journalism... New Journalism... gossip journalism to our next stop: fact-free journalism.... [Romanesko has] proven that speedily aggregated, often unsubstantiated information is marketable....
Roy Peter Clark and others at [Poynter]... are anxious that an internet giant like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo will soon dangle a big salary in front of [Romanesko] to shift-key his daily bundle of nearly 100,000 unique visitors over to its website.... I say this to the Monk of Evanston about the next time the big dogs come sniffing around: Take the money.
There are comments on the Portfolio website:
I don't know where Raines gets the idea that Romenesko's blog is gossip that can easily be dismissed. Some of it is, of course. But links to the more scurrilous stuff are listed right alongside the links to Howard Kurtz, Richard Perez-Pena and whoever covers media at the Wall Street Journal these days. Sometimes, the smaller fry have better insights and better facts, and write it in a more interesting way. Some of those folks pushed Raines from his NYT perch.... By PSteiger
Romenesko aggregates articles almost wholly from newspapers and the traditional press, so if it's a collection of unverified facts, that only goes to show what a poor job Raines's old pals are doing. By SteveRhodes
I'm sorry, but what did Howell Raines ever build from scratch? Jim Romenesko started with zero daily viewers and now gets a steady stream of 100,000-plus readers. Raines was handed the reins of the Times DC bureau and later the entire paper, just as he was handed the reins of this blog. When Raines was in charge of the Times, he didn't do much to prevent shrinking readership or to reach the young readers he now contends are no longer as interested in Romenesko's site. I never thought it possible, but Raines is actually jealous of Jim Romensko. Well done, Jim! By DeanRotbart
Jim Romensko was in Minnesota, not Wisconsin, when he started his site. By kal
There are, I think, only three "facts" I did not already know--and I don't know much about Jim Romanesko or Poynter: (1) Poynter pays Jim Romanesko $170K a year. (2) Jim Romanesko turned down an offer to jump to Brill's Content five years ago. (3) Gawker's "readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. 'I don’t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn’t directly relate to me,' says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper.... 'Romenesko... provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry--an invaluable tool for that master’s thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper'..."
And, of course, this third is not a "fact." Howell Raines has no magic surveillance machine with which he takes the pulse of what Gawker's readers say. And we all know how worthless is Howell Raines's ability to find one reporter who--anonymously--will serve as a sock puppet and do Howell Raines's bidding by saying that Jim Romanesko is a has-been about to be consumed by the monster he created. It would be something--but not much--if the "young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper" were willing to be named. It would be considerably more if Howell Raines had made some effort to demonstrate that the views of his sock puppet were in any sense representative or influential. But he doesn't. And so there are no "facts" here--at least not for any meaningful definition of "facts"--save for some interesting conclusions about the soul of Howell Raines that jump out of the page and seize one by the throat.
By contrast, I always find a huge number of interesting facts about the world whenever I surf on over to Romanesko...
