-- this whole thing about citizen journalism. But that's the deal: I want it to work.
If I work for 'the man,' then I'd better see some citizen journalists out here. And maybe I do, but not in the senses that most of the people who post here might call 'citizen journalism.' Like the county coroner who has just launched a monthly newsletter.
But if citizen journalists are part of the trend that is chewing away at print circulation, then maybe they just haven't taken root where I am. We know what has affected the circulation here to what small extent that it has, and it isn't the thousand flowers blooming of blogs or CitJ sites popping up all around us. Because there aren't any.
And it could be because when someone wants to sell us a freelance article or photo or something, we at least give them a shot, most of the time. Maybe that's it, too.
And ditto on the non-PC bit. It sure is nervy, I know. But I have been watching and taking mental notes for a long time and if you want to talk red vs. blue, North vs. South, or whatever, I think I can trump them with coastal vs. heartland. The biggest, most obvious differences appear in that comparison. Thing is, I think a coastal person is less likely to notice than heartlanders like you and me.
Why? This may seem silly, but if you watch the Food Network, for example, you'll see that the most attention is paid to coastal-type cooking; therefore, it is the most often promoted.
Study the daily news feeds and you'll see that a disproportionate amount of articles and photos file from the prominent coastal areas (and we don't need to name them here). That doesn't mean most stories will always file from there, but a day won't go by that you don't see something from them.
The result is that the coastal point of view is the one most broadly promoted in the public square. And you only have to dust off your history or sociology text to hook up to what that means.
It means that the compromises made on the coast in the name of trade and culture are pushed inland, and with much more insistence and success than in the past. That's not always a bad thing, but it certainly can present problems, as we have seen.
For example: People in Manhattan, Miami and Los Angeles, I'll bet, are more likely to say, yes, New Orleans should be rebuilt, regardless of cost. Folks in Des Moines, Denver, Muncie and Omaha are less likely to understand why anyone would live in an area that's a catastrophe waiting to happen, in the first place. But we know billions will be spent and work will be done to bring New Orleans back.
But, moving on, the effect on television, then, is obvious. Local TV reporters and anchors, especially in the heartland, are expected to perform on the same level and with the same attitudes as the major network counterparts whose anchor desks sit in the coastal areas. (I think the last time one didn't was when Max Robinson was the ABC anchor with a desk in Chicago, which lays a line to coastal culture through the Great Lakes.)
And big newspapers in the heartland, while insisting on uniqueness, look to papers in New York (mainly) for their cues on faith and practice.
When Dean Singleton wanted a new editor for the Denver Post, where did he go? To Boston.