In the spirit of my recent post ‘Why am I doing this? Muckraking?‘ is this very worthwhile and thoughtful piece in the NY Times from Frank Rich:
NY Times (click)
Confessions of a Recovering Op-Ed Columnist
… For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage.
I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap. Anyone could be a critic of the Bush administration. The challenge as a writer was to try to figure out why it governed the way it did — and how it got away with it for so long — and, dare I say it, to have fun chronicling each new outrage. …
Nice.
And equally worth reading is this from big em Media thinker Jay Rosen at PressThink, which references NY Times chief Bill Keller’s recent piece on ‘news aggregation’ (ALSO good reading!)
Jay Rosen: ‘The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists: My Talk at South By Southwest‘
Whew. Good luck.
