Susan Goldberg, longtime journalist and editor of the Plain Dealer, today spoke to The City Club of Cleveland. Radio station WCLV broadcast her address, "Reflections for the Future of Newspapers and Cleveland." Few display reporter Helen Thomas' rancor for independent media — Thomas quoted this week as calling amateur journalists "dangerous" — but one does find, pervasive among the press class, an animosity.
Goldberg first acknowledged weblogs only in consideration of them as tangential to her work. While some believe "they are changing the world," she said, as far as a newspaper editor is concerned "they are neither the problem, nor the point." Maladaptation in the information age, Goldberg suggested, causes her industry to slide, and could be remedied by changing the manner in which agencies advertise and solicit — and attract readers. To "learn from silicon valley," as she put it.
Later in her speech, however, Goldberg returned to independents. Bloggers, she charged, are "aggregators...stealing our news." To applause, she posed the city beat as arcana: if the established press didn't report urgent local news, "no one else would, because no one else can." That is ecclesiastical pique at the appeal of lay dilettantes, instructed by the persuasion that anyone who is not a journalist but peddles news wishes he were. In fact a political weblog, the higher its profile, is more likely a side trade of someone educated, specialized and accomplished.
True, bloggers are a collection. But when CBS News, three years ago, tried to pass off Word documents as thirty-year-old incrimination, the aggregators, ex vi termini, aggregated. Experts were consulted and corroborated in such immediate ways not possible ten years before; Dan Rather was reduced to a mutterer. Michael Totten, Michael Yon and other embedding freelancers have submitted more reflective dispatches and photographs from Iraq and the Near East than the most prepotent networks and bureaus. The latter spent the last five years aggregating, indeed: tentative assignments relying on native stringers.
A few moments of clarity came when Goldberg elaborated on statements made in the Plain Dealer. Editors and publishers must "think long and hard about what makes you special in your marketplace." With the customer in mind, "a front page that is made up only of things you can worry about is a failed front page." Yet in her peroration Goldberg reverted to cant. Vindication would come by harnessing the "power of diversity." Technology, professional reevaluation second? She wasn't done. Career journalists "must not tolerate the haters, because they will bring us all down," commence transmission of truth to power.
For now, only moments.