Blog 6

One of the reasons many young people list as to why they don't enjoy the company of the elderly is that they're always complaining about "hooligans" running the streets and "modern gadgets" such as computers and calculators complicating a formerly simple existence. Somewhere around the age of 65, the capacity and/or desire to keep up with such a rapidly changing world slackens while disdain for all things new--rather "not like they used to be"--increases at the same rate.

At the ripe age of 22, I've aged prematurely. I find myself reminiscing about the golden age of journalism, when newsrooms were flourishing and a press pass was the highest badge of honor outside of the military. Muckracker Mark Sullivan's 1938 lament over the gone glory days rings eerily true in a world he wouldn't even recognize were he alive today. Granted, it's hard to for me to reminisce about a time I was not alive to see, so perhaps my longing for "pure" journalism is really an uneasiness spawned from my ignorance of its opposite: today's wired media.

So as I stew in my unearned hopelessness, it's refreshing to know that not every online news upstarter is an optimistic, technology-embracing, 40-something Seattle hipster with retro black-rimmed glasses. Enter: Kery Murakami, dubbed "the reluctant news entrepreneur." Nothing but a true journalist's spirit could drive someone to essentially produce a one-man "paper" like Murakami is doing. He puts in all if not more of the shoe leather, the sleepless weeks and the more-than-occasional cuss word than your stereotypical fedora-topped reporter from back in the day. However, he recognizes that it's not the format that defines this industry, it's the purpose.

No matter how much drive you have, something green and papery has to give you the fuel you need to establish yourself as an online presence and stay that way without going bankrupt. According to Tom Mangan, it's all about audience. Finding and catering to a specific audiencecan mean the difference between a low-traffic hobby and a high-traffic, full-time blogging career. Tracking your success is even easier now with ://Urlfan.com, which ranks Web sites based on their popularity in the blogosphere.

This kind of calculated attention to detail, combined with a commitment to developing online media to include audience participation was underlined in a reporters conference, ironically held on the Google campus, our friendly search-engine-turned-world-dominator that could easily be said to be our generation's trademark. It's also vastly responsible for any feelings of information overload so nicely put into parabola to relate information intake to level of confusion.

But we can't put all the blame on Google. After all, it could secede and form its own country someday, and we already know they have global surveillance taken care of (i.e. Google Earth), and given the chance they'd make the coolest, most user friendly WMD's ever. No, the media must own up to its own role in this chaos. Whether it's treating an empty hot air balloon as if it were a Martian space craft, or saturating our minds with polls, statistics and rankings, the modern press could be its own worst enemy. And when all else fails, just make it all free!