28
Nov 09

Starr, Jarvis at Yale

A few more snippets of dialogue from the Yale conference. The optimistic digerati were most sharply attacked by Paul Starr, a Princeton academic who feels that enthusiasm for web journalism is out of control and obscuring the democratic damage being done by the disappearance of papers.

Living and working in New Jersey, he feels particularly strongly that the decline of papers (which, he notes, began well before the internet was ever a threat) has left local democracy badly damaged. He gets especially irritated by being told that barista.net is a harbinger of the future because, as a long-established online local news site it apparently makes money. That doesn’t mean that local democratic accountability is safe, he replies: baristanet is produced in Montclair, an upscale comuter dormitory for New York City – hardly typical Middle America, or even average New Jersey. And one business plan that works in the affluent north-east does not mean that journalism is saved. “There is a rot at the base of American democracy,” he said, “and we haven’t even begun to confront it.”

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