Here’s something you don’t see often: A technology journalist at a major publication who acknowledges that Dave Winer doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Jason Pontin, the editor and publisher of Technology Review, writes this in How to Save Media:
The Gotterdammerung-of-mainstream-media argument has a weak and a strong formulation. …The strong version is most associated with Dave Winer, a grumpy California software programmer best known for helping to develop the Web-feed format RSS and for his blog, Scripting News. Winer has written, and not without glee, “Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists. … Everyone is now a journalist.”
If media companies can’t earn money, and everyone is a journalist, it follows that “amateurs” (Shirky) and “sources” (Winer) will be part of a “decentralized” media (Winer), whose stories will be distributed by “excitable 14-year-olds” (Shirky).
This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. True, the journalists who write about these matters for mainstream media often know as little; I didn’t understand much until I became the publisher of Technology Review as well as its editor in chief. But Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.
Winer’s been treated like an informed media expert for years, but his entire professional experience in journalism consists of writing commentary for Wired for one year back in the ’90s.
Pontin goes on to say on Twitter, when criticized over the piece, that “These people are, I think, insane. Filled with hostility, completely impractical, and, in the final analysis, dishonest.” Winer doesn’t know journalism, but at least one journalist knows him pretty well.
Tags: business, dave winer, jason pontin, Journalism, Media, technology review
This is funny, but I feel constrained to comment that my Tweet wasn’t really directed at Winer (who may not know much about media, but is an always interesting writer about technology), but rather at Dave’s followers, who were upset that I questioned his thesis that “sources will fill where we used to need journalists” (see: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/17/ifYouDontLikeTheNews.html) and that this a very good thing.
Winer thinks your message was directed at him:
http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1765134983
It should have been directed at him. Dave’s followers are stupid because of who they take their cues from. He’s a self-glorifying dilettante.
One thing I’ve learned reading Dave’s notes over the years are that he seems to think in very idealistic, somewhat naive views about how the media works.
For instance, his claims about Journalism always end up going back to the point thinking he has the qualifications and that “every man” will fill in the gap. I think he’s also said stuff like “advertising will die”, etc. He seems to believe technology alone will change the future and bring a utopia where old main stream media failed, forgetting that so-called revolutionary change doesn’t happen that quickly.
If you note his latest complaints about Twitter, he seems upset that both business and media entertainers entered the game. I noted during the podcasting boom that he complained about podcasters who were treating the medium with humour and satire.
Anyway, I’ve become a little critical of the entire media circuit. Authors like Dave and those who write on Techmeme are so quick to criticize “old media”, want to defend piracy and attack those who fight it, etc. I think that itself shows a very biased viewpoint.
Dave is also obsessed with Twitter and seems to be hell bent on trying to make people leave Twitter. This constant call to blow up Twitter and throw “federated” decentralized Twitters out to the world is just an attack on the success of Ev and Biz. Right now,
I would not be surprised if a count showed that Dave posted 200 times or more over the last year just about Twitter.
The other funny thing is there was this whole navel gazing session over Twitter as the coral reef, Twitter being undefined and different things to everyone. Now suddenly Twitter must be the printing press of journalism, the celebrities are using and abusing it, and Twitter is mistreating their users.
Enough!
Winer also likes to criticize Twitter because he’s in a minority about what it is. Look at his recent recap of what “celebrities” post about on twitter: he notes that “most of it is what-I-had-for-lunch kind of stuff– in particular @Ev and @Biz are the biggest offenders” (I’m paraphrasing). Never mind that Ev and Biz aren’t celebrities among any group but the ingrown, self-congratulatory world of the tech industry, note that Winer’s biggest criticism of them is that they don’t use Twitter for “journalism”.
As I’ve said before, Dave is hell-bent on turning Twitter into a journalistic outfit precisely because that would undermine the company and put enormous ethical restrictions on what they do. The SUL, for example, only represents a “conflict of interest” if Twitter is a journalistic medium– and only a journalistic medium. So by callously attacking people who post what they ate for lunch today (that isn’t “journalism”), Dave is pushing, again his agenda.
I don’t like to comment about people’s motivations, but one thing that pops out at me whenever I read Winer’s thoughts about Twitter is an extreme jealousy toward Twitter’s founder’s, Ev and Biz. I don’t know if Winer is actually jealous of them, but his writing seems to imply it. Knowing how dishonest he can be when pushing an agenda (ex, Obama), it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Dave’s continued writings on the death of media and Twitter as its replacement are really just an attempt to torpedo Twitter.