Steve Rhodes takes the inimitable Dawn Taylor Trice to task for fatuous observations on “the air waves” the other night about the future of newspapers.
Can you imagine the civil rights movement without newspapers? Trice asked. If the Internet was around, certainly! [Rhodes commented] Can you imagine! YouTube video of Bull Connor and Internet fundraising for SNCC and MLK blogging directly to the people. Progress would have come much sooner.
He’s down on “Old World journalists” in general.
The very idea that the facts of a new media world – and the underappreciated facts of the newspaper industry’s gross negligence and essential journalistic malpractice of the last three decades – are still dawning on our nation’s newsrooms is just incredible. The time to ask how and why is long past.
This is in Rhodes’s Beachwood Reporter, which rocks — that is, pleases me greatly — and will you too, I bet.
Blithe Spirit 
Well, the times they are a changing and the “old media” is gettng passed by. On the other hand, today’s so-called citizen journalists are all too often a galaxy of undisciplined gotcha bloggers without specifc journalistic standards or gatekeepers. I’m all for a free preess…but not a carefree one. If that sounds elitist, that’s right! Some people are more trained & equipped than others to run a paper, throw a football, or perform surgery on my body. And if that seems undemocratic, well one needs to define what they mean by democratic
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