"The mainstream news industry dug itself this hole by not
staying smart, humble, hungry and focused, and now it blames the
geeks.
"Some of the incurious double-digit-IQ nonsense I've heard in
the newsrooms of old-line mainstream publications would make the
average geek bite a mousepad in half. Frankly, a lot of people with
journalism degrees are the last people who ought to become
journalists.
"The idea of journalism as a white-collar profession, rather
than a grubby old trade, is only a few decades old. As the
profession became a more attractive line of work to the children of
the middle and upper classes (because like the song says, there's
only so much you can do with a BA in English), its practitioners
wanted to retain some shred of elevated class identity, as they
would have if they'd gone into medicine or the law. The job of
journalism became less a matter of scrap and skill and shoe leather
and more about one's educational (and, to some extent, cultural)
bona fides."
