Ron Rosenbaum is probably as powerless as the rest of us to prevent the sad fate that seems to await print journalism. But that doesn't mean that his jeremiad against Jeff Jarvis--a former ink-stained wretch who, with his Buzz Machine blog, has remade himself into one of the leading new-media gurus--isn't extremely satisfying. To wit:
Not all reporters had the prescience to become new-media consultants. A
lot of good, dedicated people who have done actual writing and
reporting, as opposed to writing about writing and reporting, have been
caught up in this great upheaval, and many of them may have been too
deeply involved in, you know, content—"subjects," writing
about real peoples' lives—to figure out that reporting just isn't where
it's at, that the smart thing to do is get a consulting gig.
Read the whole thing . . . or at least the first half of it. (Since Rosenbaum wrote it for a digital publication, he does start to ramble a bit toward the end, which reminds me of yet another great thing about print: concision!)
--Jason Zengerle