Truemors
Daniel Schorr,
at age 91, is a news legend. During his 60+ year career in journalism
has seen the evolution of news in print, radio, TV and now the
Internet. In a recent interview with The Columbus Dispatch, Schorr professes his disdain at bloggers and citizen journalists.
Perhaps being part of establishment for so long as eschewed Schorr’s view of journalism. After all Schorr himself got his start at the age of twelve.
In 1929, he came upon a woman who had jumped or fallen from the roof of
his apartment building. After he called the police, Schorr phoned a
local newspaper and was paid $5 for his information. Maybe if the same
incident had occurred today, a young Schorr would have blogged about it
instead, complete with images from the scene taken from his cell phone
camera. Or to put it bluntly, Shorr would have been a citizen
journalist, the very thing he now decries.
From The Columbus Dispatch interview:
Q: In some commentaries, you touch on the latest journalistic
trends, such as blogs and citizen journalism. Do you embrace this form
of news gathering?
A: I can’t embrace it. Not after what I’ve been through at the hands
of the copy editors’ desks. I have suffered many, many arguments about
what I’ve wanted to say — whether it was grammatically correct,
factually correct and all of that — and I want everybody to have to
experience what I experienced.
But today, your blogger is totally free. He is his own reporter, his
own editor, his own publisher, and he can do whatever he wants.
A person like me who believes in the tradition of a discipline in
journalism can only rue the day we’ve arrived at where we don’t need
discipline or anything. All you need is a keyboard.
Comments (0)