One of the reasons that I’m a lurker on Twitter is that every time I tweet an idea, I feel like I’m delivering something to the competition that I ought to be giving to a reporter here.
Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it’s also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.
Twitter and Facebook are brilliant- tools, the journalistic uses of which are still being plumbed. They are great for disseminating interesting material. They are useful for gathering information, including from places that are inaccessible.
I don’t think fairness means that you give equal time to every point of view no matter how marginal. You weigh the sides, you do some truth-testing, you apply judgment to them.
The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your website and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.
I think there’s been a decline in the public’s access to what’s being done with their tax dollars, what’s being done in their name. I hope that that will be repaired.
