According to the Knight Citizens News Network, web sites like this one represent a big part of the future of community journalism. I’m flattered that they chose to feature Blue Ridge Muse as part of their "learning modules" but I’m not sure how a 61-year-old ink-stained newspaperman ended up as an example of the "new media."
God knows the print media that has been a major part of so much of my adult life is fading away. The Journal Register Company is shutting down several of its weekly newspapers, effective immediately. The Tribune Co., owner of The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, is in bankruptcy. In Detroit, the newspapers cut their home delivery to just three days a week. Some newspapers have closed down their print operations and now deliver news only on the Internet.
A Pew Research Center study during the 2008 Presidential campaign revealed that most Americans get their political news from television and the Internet.
For someone who still writes for a newspaper, this is a bitter pill. But I also publish a political news web site that has been on the Web since 1994 and have far more readers there than the combined circulations of all the newspapers I’ve worked for during the last 43 years.
The times, they are a-changing.
most provoative and informative – Have a special holiday with the penguin -chaser and others !!Sandy
When chill November’s surly blast
Made fields and forests bare,
One evening, as I wandered forth,
Along the bank of Ayr,
I spied a man, whose aged step
Seemed weary, worn with care;
His face was furrowed o’er with years,
And hoary was his hair.
“Young stranger, whither wanderest thou?”
Began the reverend sage;
“Does thirst of wealth thy step constrain,
Or youthful pleasure’s rage?
Or haply, prest with cares and woes,
Too soon thou has began
To wander forth, with me, to mourn
The miseries of man!
“The sun that overhangs yon moors,
Outspreading far and wide,
Where hundreds labor to support
A haughty lordling’s pride —
I’ve seen yon weary winter sun
Twice forty times return;
And every time has added proof
That man was made to mourn.
“O man, while in the early years,
How prodigal of time!
Misspending all thy precious hours,
Thy glorious youthful prime!
Alternate follies take the sway:
Licentious passions burn;
Which ten-fold force gives nature’s law,
That man was made to mourn.
“Look not alone on youthful prime,
Or manhood’s active might;
Men then is useful to his kind
Supported in his right;
But see him on the edge of life,
With cares and sorrows worn,
Then age and want, O ill-matched pair!
Show man was made to mourn.
“A few seem favorites of fate,
In pleasure’s lap carest;
Yet think not all the rich and great
Are likewise truly blest.
But, oh, what crowds in every land
Are wretched and forlorn!
Through weary life this lesson learn —
That man was made to mourn.
“Many and sharp the numerous ills,
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heaven-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
“See yonder poor, o’erlabored wight,
So abject, mean and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, ‘though a weeping wife
And help less offspring mourn.
“If I’m designed you lording’s slave —
By nature’s law designed —
Why was a independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty and scorn?
Or why has man the will and power
To make his fellow mourn?
“Yet let not this too much, my son,
Disturb thy youthful breast:
This partial view of humankind
Is surely not the last!
The poor oppressed, yet honest man
Had never, sure, been born,
Had there not been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn!
“O death! the poor man’s dearest friend,
The kindest and the best!
Welcome the hour my aged limbs
Are laid with thee at rest!
The great, the wealthy, fear thy blow,
From pomp and pleasure torn;
But, oh, a blest relief to those
That weary-laden mourn!”
More than 200 years ago, Rabbie Burns was prescient in describing today’s loss of unbiased information, even if that loss is acknowledged by so few of us. We once relished the opportunity to read men’s written thoughts and to gain knowledge and news of foreign events. we hungered for and sought the recherché. We relied on the ‘broadsheet’ newspapers to gift us a window to the small mudball that’s our wee part of this huge universe even through the tint of its proprietor’s leanings.
For a short time during its nascence our television news services kept the covenant to keep us informed . . . yet it took less than a generation for it to become partisan and a scant generation again to become vacuous and venial, inward looking and closed to external comment. And on that path it served us a dish of censored pap to keep us fat, happy and ignorant . . . Oh, and how eagerly we lapped at the greasy margins of that dish yet faint to venture beyond the scant depth of our lips to question the recipe!
But in these lean times as our ignorance and our pocketbooks are exposed to our (self)-righteous indignation to learning about people and practices we wilfully ignored as not relevant to our lives, we turn to the global phenomena of ‘le Blog’.
‘le Blog’, a parochial observation all to frequently tainted beyond reason to the ‘casus bellum’ of the scribbler’s pen to parchment.
As I read you Doug, I feel common emotions and sympathy to your frustration with our society’s wilful desire to stay ill informed and our ‘master’s’ need to keep up that way. So rather than rail against the death of traditional journalism, look to create its offspring. CHB is a long standing bastion of free thought though from my rather jaundiced eye, is as parochial to the DC beltway as is your Muse to the hills of Virginia.
Both serve a cause, yet it’s the news from Floyd that has more personal emotional impact even though it’s 4000 miles from me. The cause? The quality of your writing. Half a century of ever decreasing standards on television has influenced the younger members in the daily rags to write with the same effervescent flatulence we see on broadcast news.
Perhaps one day there will be a ‘blog of blogs’, taking the best from around the World and weaving a cohesive inter-relationship that helps us understand the global nature of news and our place in it.
John.