For those of you who actually pay attention to every little detail about the Chicago Argus, you noticed earlier this week that this weblog became one of many across the country whose content is distributed by BlogBurst. (Their logo is at the bottom of the right-hand column of this weblog).
Their service (which doesn’t pay me a dime) takes the content of weblogs and distributes them to companies that publish websites, which then have the option of putting links to the posts on their own websites. Many of these companies are established newsgathering organizations who use the BlogBurst-distributed content to supplement their own work.
I OFFERED UP the Chicago Argus content (which does not yet provide me with any income) out of some hope that BlogBurst would expand the numbers of people who find, read and enjoy this site, since people who click onto a BlogBurst link can be taken from wherever they were on the Internet directly to this site, if they wish.
But I never envisioned what would happen next.
The Chicago Sun-Times website (http://www.suntimes.com/) is a BlogBurst client, and their site immediately latched onto eight commentaries I wrote here during the past month. Copies of all eight are now posted on the newspaper’s website. For all I know, more may turn up there in coming days and weeks (although personally, I’m more interested in seeing if Fox News websites have the nerve to run any of my commentary, which is more honest than a lot of the claptrap we hear from their loudmouthed, high-paid talking heads).
That is how it came to be that one who goes rooting around the depths of the Sun-Times website can find the commentary I wrote Feb. 19 about how ridiculous the newspaper’s coverage was of the Northern Illinois University gunman’s girlfriend and her teary interview with CNN.
THE COMMENTARY WAS a part of my occasional “Ink Stained Wretch” series of media criticism where I try to channel the ghost of the Chicago Journalism Review of old and offer explanations of how news coverage went awry, or could have been done more responsibly.
On that date, the Sun-Times (a newspaper I still enjoy reading, even in its current emasculated format) was my target.
Either some editorial staffers at the Sun-Times are secure enough in their jobs to accept the headline “Is the Sun-Times off-kilter in DeKalb coverage” on their own web site, or someone wrote a computer program that selected my commentary without really understanding its content.
I’d like to think it’s the former, but my personal experience with computers in the work world makes me realize it probably was a dumb machine rather than a clever person at work.
FOR FEAR OF sounding like a crabby old man yelling at the neighborhood kids to “Get Off My Lawn,” there are too many people in this world who are growing up thinking about how to find key words in an essay, rather than comprehending the content of whatever it is they are reading.
Reading this juxtaposition of critical commentary (http://tinyurl.com/22w8nk) published in the original source was the highlight of my day Wednesday, and one of the most unusual things I have ever seen turn up on a so-called Mainstream Media website.
And now, a month later, I still think it was tacky for the newspaper to over-hype that teary-eyed interview, which wasn’t even their own to begin with.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment