Rosie DiManno on the “digital dross”
Increasingly, print doesn’t matter anymore, writes Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno – and that’s a bad thing.
Increasingly, print doesn’t matter anymore, writes Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno – and that’s a bad thing.
“It’s verging,” she adds, “on relic reportage.” All this digital, multi-platform focus, says DiManno, only does one thing: distracts from the one thing that should matter to print journalism – the words.
“I’m not opposed to change,” she writes, “I just don’t think we know what we’re doing.”
Does she have a point?
Well, she’s certainly not the only one who wonders whether news organizations are throwing newsrooms under the bus.
[node:ad]Referencing a recent David Carr article in The New York Times, “Why not occupy newsrooms?”, DiManno writes:
It’s not that newspapers are dying because they’ve reached a point of extinction, a selected media Darwinism. It’s because they’re being stabbed in the back by those operating from within the boardrooms.
We’re deliberately weaning readers off the tactile experience of newspapers by luring them to instant, sloppy, error-riddled, cursorily edited reportage. Then we wonder why circulation is declining? Like I said, dumb as a bag of hammers, the ruling elite in my business. But they’ll retire to lives of leisure and financial security.
For more, check out her piece over at the Star. It’s worth a read even if you think she’s dead wrong.
