Print This Post Print This Post

Nov

10

Why Wide Open mattered to news consumers (PD 3 weeks late to the news)


It’s nice that the Plain Dealer editorial board saw fit to write a column about the endangered species, GOP Women.

But I wrote about the impending problem three weeks ago, 10/21/07, on Wide Open: GOP Women in OH GA: endangered species (based on a Columbus Dispatch story).

Then, again, two days ago, 11/8/07, on WLST (it would have gone onto Wide Open, but, well, we all know what happened there): Jon Husted gives two GOP women endangered species protection (this time, I used information from Politics Extra as the source)

And then, there are all these posts I’ve written about the women in political office issue as pursued by the White House Project. When I started on the topic, just over a year ago after the 2006 election, I even pitched the topic to a couple of markets in a couple of ways – no real bites. Then, I pitched it again a few months ago, when I learned that WHP is coming to Ohio (I’m helping the effort) and again, no real bites.

That’s okay – writers are incredibly accustomed to rejection. Seriously. And we just keep going.

But what about news consumers? Do you just keep going, trying to keep up on news that interests you? Or are you okay with waiting until an editorial board decides for you as to when some information equals news?

That’s no disrespect for people who like waiting to learn what others think is news. Let’s face it – it’s been that way for a long time. And, if you don’t mind letting the PD or other news outlets decide when news that’s already out there has risen to the level that the Plain Dealer editorial board or other entities’ gatekeepers believe is high enough to give it status as editorial fodder, that’s fine.

But I know I don’t. And that approach to news consumption isn’t the only one people have to choose from anymore.

The availability of other ways to consume news is one of the reasons I blog, read blogs and use the Internet to learn about news: these sources let me go after topics that interest me so that I can judge what’s interesting about that topic and decide whether I find the information to be news.

Of course, I can’t know or take the time to find all the news that could potentially interest me. That’s why I subscribe to a zillion RSS feeds and email newsletters, including many from the Plain Dealer. And the New York Times and a couple of print magazines.

But what’s even worse about the PD being three weeks late to the party, at a minimum, on this story is that the editorial is completely devoid of why – why does the information in the editorial matter? We think it’s obvious, but it isn’t.

And that’s where readers and blog commenters come in.

When I’ve written about this topic of women in politics, on both WLST and Wide Open, commenters let me know whether and how and why it matters to them.

One of the most vociferously to the right commenters at Wide Open, “Joe EC,” left this comment (in pertinent part) that demonstrates the advantage of blogs, over the static print editorial, very well (as did many comment threads on Wide Open):

Why do we need more women. If we need to go out of our way to convince women to run that otherwise aren’t willing or desire to, what quality of legislator will that produce. What we have of both sexes is bad enough now without setting up some artifical estrogen quota. What is the evidence that more women improves the legislative process.

Ironically, the last post I had at Wide Open, as a draft, the morning of October 30, included a dramatic graph and information about Ohio’s plunging number of women in its statehouse – specifically geared to answer Joe EC’s question of why we need women in the statehouse.

But the PD didn’t learn from that blog post’s comment – it doesn’t say a word in its editorial today about why we need women in the statehouse. And without that crucial information, the conversation around women in political office will remain at the level of whether identity politics matter. A fine question, but not deep enough – certainly not deep enough for an editorial which, I would expect, to go deeper. The fact that the PD editorials do not go deep enough is, in fact, one reason I dropped my print subscription.

Sigh.

So, again, we see concrete evidence as to the value of a forum with two from the left, two from the right, that attracted readers and commenters from all along the spectrum: they challenged us, they made us dig deeper for answers and justifications, they made us question and re-think – and we made them do that too, even if they’d never admit it (although a few commenters did, and I know my co-bloggers did from time to time as well).

If a working definition of journalism is going to exclude those interactions, then I’m more than happy to find a better word to describe news gathering, dissemination, consumption – and the interactions that result from those activities.

What would you re-name this set of activities, if not journalism?

Bookmark and Share

By Jill Miller Zimon at 11:41 am November 10th, 2007 in Blogging, Elections, Government, Media, Ohio, Politics, Statehouse, Wide Open, Women 

Comments

One Response to “Why Wide Open mattered to news consumers (PD 3 weeks late to the news)”

  1. 1 links for 2007-11-10 | Brewed Fresh Daily on December 31st, 2007 4:21 pm

    [...] Why Wide Open mattered to news consumers (PD 3 weeks late to the news) | Writes Like She Talks (tags: PeeDeeGate) [...]

Leave a Reply




"));