Audio Activism

Dennis Howlett over at Bazaarz.com linked to AudioActivism as part of a response to Dave Winer’s slam of the NY Times which I applauded. Here are my thoughts for Dennis. So nice to see a civil discussion. So unlike some personal attacks I’ve read.

Thanks for linking to AudioActivism Dennis! Much respect for all journalists skills, hard work, blood, and sweat.

Your friend in San Francisco is right. Many Americans, myself included, are sick and tired of our media. That’s one reason we are making it ourselves. But many of us don’t call ourselves journalist and never will. Complicated and paradigm changing I know.

On the issue of trust it boils down to knowing someone. No longer do I automatically trust those who make news just because they do it professionally. I trust my neighbors and fellow bloggers whom I have met. (physically and virtually) When they trust someone else they pass along that recommendation. It’s this honnest system of transference that is completely and so terribly broken down in the main stream media.

I dream of a day when my next door neighbor will be better informed about events thousands of miles away than any journalist.

I love it when smart tech folks jump in the fray and tear the MSM [main stream media] a new one. Case in point; Dave Winer says this about the NY Times:

I’ve now gotten three emails saying they recently let a blogger on their op-ed page, but that’s very very different from having a blogger on their op-ed page. Give a blogger a guest slot, great, if you don’t like the piece, you don’t have to run it. But if you have a blogger there regularly, then you have to run what they wrote, and that would change the character of their editorial, it would make their regular writers think twice about taking the inexcusable shortcuts they take.

# Read the rest

And then he wrote this:

And of course let’s not forget the big stuff — they [NY Times] went to war with George Bush without calling him on his bullshit. They need some strong medicine, they’ve acknowledged it, but they refuse to take it. The stupidity of it is that it would sell newspapers, it would make them money, because they’d become much more interesting. They’re just too scared to piss off their world famous reporters, who don’t want to be challenged. They could make their paper interesting, but they don’t want interesting, they want job security. That’s their real problem, that’s where they need to embrace the web, and that’s what they haven’t done.

I freaking LOVE IT! Bloggers and Podcasters are FRESH and make media intersting!