In his Washington Post article entitled “I Really Need You to Read This Article, Okay?“, Joel Achenbach writes about the popularity shift of newspapers as a means to get the news.
“Our future is on the Web,” he begins.
The term “newspaper journalism” used to resonate a sense “literary efforts [levitating] above the commercial fray,” but, according to Achenbach, no longer is this true. Nowadays, it’s all about page-views, about “eyeballs.”
“Marketing…may increasingly become part of the journalistic mix,” Achenbach writes.
But there is still respect for skill. Regardless of platform, “good writing remains good writing” and although “the Web tends to be a chattier place…it is still a place where readers appreciate a well-crafted sentence, a nuanced thought, a fully elucidated thesis and commentary undergirded by fact, honesty and a generosity of spirit.”
To quote the HBO series The Wire, it’s the same game as always — just more fierce.
At the end of the day, though, our readers aren’t unintelligent.
“The most-read stories online are often what we’d all agree are the best pieces of journalism…but page-views can also lead journalists away from what we do best,” Achenbach reminds us.
This article wasn’t necessarily eye-opening, but it was definitely an interesting and relatively amusing rant.
Achenbach maintains his own blog, Achenblog, quite regularly.
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