Two comments from the fabulously named Noodlepie, Graham Holliday’s blog about journalism, food and other wonderful things.

First off: one commenter notes that journalists largely treat the internet like an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. Sometimes the entrees are tasty and refreshing, other times they’re old, stale and previously touched.

“… The internet is a pub. The journalists are outside on a fag break. Every now and then they hear someone shouting or screaming inside the pub. They go in, ask what’s happening, take some notes and nip back outside for another fag break. On the second fag break, they are joined by their editors who cherrypick the journalist’s notes before heading back to the newsroom to add cherries as deemed necessary - with a nice fat link back to the man in the pub.

The journalists don’t really hang out in the pub, but they’re in and out on a regular basis.

Business as usual then really… That make sense?”

And another person (and freelance journalist) has a comment about Web 2.0 evangelists:

“… My point - although it’s a gut emotional response, really – is that I can’t stand the stupid technological determinism of Web 2.0 evangelists: i.e. the assumption that because technology has the potential to change something, that change will necessarily occur. Nope, it’s people that make changes - although they often use technology to do it. I think this may be what you call “pseudowank”, which is a much better term. Can I suggest you start a blog under that title?

Oh, the other thing that annoys me (while I’m ranting) is that the debate about “journalism, social media, people-who-used-to-be-the-audience blah, blah, blah” is so skewed towards the evangelists. This is a small bubble, and there are a lot of people outside it - in academia, for example - who have very interesting things to say about media, democracy, information rights, etc who are just ignored - probably because they are writing deeply researched books about it, rather than spewing out blogs or polishing their TED powerpoints.”

[tags] pseudowank, TED, social media [/tags]