Looking for signs of journalistic hope

The good news: WikiLeaks is back. The bad news: Almost everything else.

GOOD NEWS:

• The promising WikiLeaks site is back, and it's looking for donations so it may continue on.

• The American public knows how bad the journalism they're getting is. That suggests they'll demand something better, though the jury's still out. At least, the fact that they are increasingly looking for their news online is hopeful, since that is where change (for better or worse) is most likely to arrive.

• Al Sullivan, columnist for the local paper, has been showing much more skill than we've credited him with in the past. And he's taken our jibes with good grace. In fact, the paper in general is performing better than we can remember. (Granted, that's not saying much. This is after all the chain that gave rise to the ridiculous Mister Snitch column of our namesake. Not that we should throw stones, since one of the biggest posts we ever wrote was on this subject.)

• The Drew Carey Project. Whoa - rich, retired comedian becomes documentary commentator? Who saw that coming? And the pieces are tight and good.


BAD NEWS:

• The Associated Press shuts down a blogger critic. Yes, that's right - a media site is censoring down another media site.

• The Jersey Journal is worthless, and decent reporting of Jersey City events online is nearly nonexistent. (Tris McCall refers to the area as 'The Land of Silence'.)

• We actually trekked over to RealHoboken in an attempt to see if the site had improved journalistically. All we could find on the front page were the usual fluff pieces (such as where to drink on St. Patty's Day - though useful information to some no doubt). In the article archives, we found some accounts of fires and deaths, but nothing insightful, nothing revealing. (We'd be more than willing to say RH "is what it is" - a fluff site - and be done with it. The world needs fluff, we like fluff, and a good deal of what we do here is fluff. But Joe Concha keeps showing up here, usually for no particular reason, to insist that his site is so much more than that. So we re-checked. Nope. Anything that might be there is buried too deep to find.)

We invite Concha to stop by and, if he can refrain from the tired insults, offer some links to his site's best pieces of legitimate journalism. We'd like to offer something constructive to say about his site, particularly as he did offer a pretty scathing critique of Klaussen's 411. Although the criticism was transparently self-aggrandizing, it was hard-hitting and largely on the nose. To us, this means than Concha is capable of... more than we've seen from him.

• To be fair and balanced, as they say, we checked into Hoboken 411, which for quite a while associated the Hoboken Reporter with a shredding machine. The local paper indeed deserves a fair amount of criticism, but does that mean 411's journalistic practices are superior? We checked. 'Scoops' like this one are nothing to be proud of, but reports like this are legitimate. However, it must be pointed out that mainstream media do most of the legwork for Klaussen's 'legit' stories. (This is something, by the way, we've seen the local press grouse about.) There's still way more heat than light coming from over there, and sometimes there's outright fraud. 411 does a good job covering the local businesses, for which it ought to be commended. And Klaussen works very long, hard hours to make a dollar. But none of this excuses the slander and sleaze that Klaussen not only allows but encourages on his site.

• Localblogging in general is just not making it. Perhaps the ongoing growth of the net will change that, but localblogging investors such as Google are not making the difference we had once hoped for. At least part of the problem, when big-media investors decide to 'go local', is that they hire the same kind of people they would have hired for print media. Or, in Google's case, they'll hire someone their culture feels comfortable with. Wannabe local media titans should research their hires much more carefully, because the right hire (not just the cheap hire) makes all the difference between success and failure. Anything else, frankly, looks like Astroturfing - and the locals know the difference.

• Have we mentioned just how incredibly bad The Jersey Journal is?

UPDATE: An inspired piece on what journalists ought to be doing. Best part:

Creative, Entertaining, and Very Short Writing — As everything now known as “media” converges to the Internet, journalists will soon be competing for audiences against former newspapers/TV news, prime-time programming, movies, video games, blogs, and even porn. Many now-common styles will not remain competitive, including the use of serious and faux-authoritative tones, the pretense of objectivity, and “inverted pyramid” articles that become increasingly trivial and boring the deeper one reads. This course will explore a variety of alternative and entertaining styles, including humorous, warm, crusading, inspirational, empathetic, and titillating. Students will also learn how to write catchy headlines and compelling text in 300 words or less, recognizing the mouse-trigger-happy character of news consumers.

We're guilty of some overlong posts, ourselves. But our headlines take a backseat to nobody.