Bloggasm

Earlier this year, the AP released a poll that showed that one in every four Americans didn’t read a book last year. Though many reacted with alarm, I shrugged my shoulders and said, “So What?”.

I don’t subscribe to the ubiquitous notion that to not read books–especially those canonical in nature–relegates one to social ineptness. There are dozens of forms of media–newspapers, magazines, radio shows, podcasts, youtube videos, movies, television–and there is no logical proof to show that reading books trumps these other mediums.

Before linking to the New York Magazine review of the book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, I will issue the same ironic caveat as the reviewer: I haven’t read the book in question.

That being said, I was particularly interested in this section of the review:

But Professeur Bayard, a practicing psychoanalyst, is not so interested in practical tips. His goal is more ambitious: He wants to cure us of the deep cultural neuroses that govern our reading. His main argument, synopsized identically in reviews from here to Berlin, runs roughly as follows. Western culture has fetishized books almost as much as it has breasts and cash. Our reading is governed by a corrosive idealism that fills us all with secret shame: We believe we should be doing it more and better, and that, until we do, we fully deserve to be sneered at by college dropouts at the Strand.

I haven’t read Moby Dick. I may or may not have read a Jane Austen book at some point; I can’t remember. I have certainly not read Ulysses . In fact, when you take the time to consider that I was an English major in college, my ignorance of the canon is astounding.

Still, on a daily basis I listen to over an hour of NPR news, read through hundreds of blog posts and newspaper articles, listen to podcasts ranging from This American Life to BBC film reviews, read the New Yorker from cover to cover and even manage to read the occasional history book chapter or see a movie or watch a television show.

These media outlets are the amalgamation of my curiosity and search for knowledge. And yes, I do buy and read books sometimes, but I count myself lucky if I finish half a dozen a year.

The caricatures who most often follow the apocryphal fetishism of books are the ones most likely to complain that TV is “all crap.” My Dear, look at the bookshelves at your local bookstore. The vast majority of every form of media is shit. For those who are intellectually curious–like me–the trick is to wade through it and find the gems.

I have spent hours and hours– after heading home from my job as a newspaper reporter — dreaming about what I would do if I were to have $1 million or so fall into my lap. Almost all of these daydreams consisted of me starting some kind of online media publication, of which I would be editor and publisher. I’ll keep most of my ideas to myself, just in case that scenario ever comes to fruition.

Of course I was salivating today when I read that lucky students from Jeff Jarvis’s class will get to live out a very similar scenario. They’ve received a $100,000 grant to engage in “entrepreneurial journalism.”

Of course if I were to receive this kind of financial backing, then it would ruin the idealist nature of Web 2.0, the sense that we can pick ourselves up to media stardom by simply starting with a blog.

With the doom and gloom storm clouds gathering, we’ve seen news article after article about layoffs in major newspaper companies. But we also see little trickles of information that local newspapers are doing well–actually increasing in ad sales.

So it has been interesting to see the debate as to how the journalism job market is doing. Mediashift has an in-depth discussion on the topic, followed by a rebuttal by Rough Type, followed by a counter-rebuttal from Mediashift.

Verdict? Journalism jobs are decreasing, but at a slower rate than perhaps we originally thought.

What the articles fail to point out is the increase in full-time bloggers. I would say that there are now more than 1,000 bloggers out there who make a full-time living–whether it’s through adsense or some other form of online advertising. If you combine this with the new digital jobs at more traditional forms of media, then perhaps you’ll see an even more healthy job market.

Have I been sleeping under a rock for the last few days? I just found out that Mediabistro, the huge blog network that focuses on the media, has sold for $23 million to Jupitermedia Corporation. To my knowledge, this is the second largest blog sale in history, second only to the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, Inc by AOL.

Suddenly, running a media blog doesn’t seem so hopeless.

via nyobserver

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Related posts:
1. The New Yorker profiles Rupert Murdoch
2. Interview with Laurence Simon from This Blog is Full of Crap

Here’s a real shocker, a study shows that teens don’t follow current events.

I was watching the excellent movie Sicko last night and it got me thinking about the mainstream media’s rush to debunk everything Moore does. He makes for an easy target, a way for them to prove they’re not biased. How could they be liberally slanted? They just spent five minutes attacking his documentary, after all. If they spend time attacking him, then maybe conservatives would think that they were “balanced” after all.

Read about the hit job CNN performed on Moore the other day.

This is something that I think about every day. If I had a few million dollars drop in my lap and I could start some kind of news publication, how would my model work? I might have some time at a later date to actually go into great detail about this plan, but for right now, Media Shift is asking its readers to come up with the perfect newsroom. Given all the available technology systems for journalists– wikis, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, twitter, plus traditional systems— if you could build a news room from scratch, how would you do it? If you have more free time than I do, go answer.