Bring on the future
Inspired by Ryan Sholin's post at Invisible Inkling, in which he is wearying of the "business of chasing after curmudgeons with a laptop in my hand, shouting 'But you got it all wrong!'" I want to pose the question in a different way.
Isn't it time that we just let the curmudgeons go, treating them as if they are the equivalent of newspaper trolls?
Hardly a day passes without Romenesko linking to someone bemoaning the loss of the good old days, how dumb newspaper owners are and how stupid the audience is? I grant you things were easier when we had more money and more control. But were they better for readers? No. Could we tell our stories in new, helpful ways? No.
Unless you're looking at history to learn for the future, you're wasting your time. Move on. Complaining about the present won't bring the past back.
Comments (1)
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Sure, but publishers will claim its "discriminatory." I was laid off last year (thank you dean singleton) even though I was a blogger, did multimedia projects, etc. When I went to sign all the paperwork I was given a list of the ages of newsroom employees, those who were laid off and those weren't. I was 33 at the time and maybe the oldest person to get canned. The publisher (who had retired and come back and so pulling a pension and fat paycheck) said the point of the list was to prove the paper hadn't committed age discrimination. It took all my restraint not to say, "you sure did. You discriminated against young people."
Posted on January 21, 2008 7:35 PM