too many Daves

I came to hear the exchange above thanks to this Twitter post by NYU’s Jay Rosen:

Rosen is consistently interesting. Because of this, I follow him on Twitter. But I’m sometimes left with a sense that there’s a rigidness to Rosen, a certain with-me-or-against-me outlook. So I followed the link Rosen posted, thinking I might feel sorry for “the worst reader representative I know of in American newspapers.” Well, I don’t.

I’m not prepared to call Ted Diadiun of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer the worst anything. But the video Rosen linked to is pretty shabby. If you have all the time in the world, just go ahead an watch it.

Weekly chat with Reader Rep Ted Diadiun

To me, Diadium comes across as a man who doesn’t get it and doesn’t want to get it. Consider this assertion by Diadium: “A big reaction in the blog world is maybe 100 people.” Has this man read recent coverage on his own newspaper’s site — the story headlined “Cyber world rallies to aid Iran protesters,” for instance? Does he know what happened on the web when Michael Jackson died? If he does, does he think “maybe 100” guys generated all the fuss? In his mind, are there at least “maybe 100” guys who care about Iran and another “maybe 100” guys who care about Michael Jackson? Because that right there would be 200 guys and he’d be moving toward a more accurate estimate, at least.

But it’s the pairing of Diadium and Plain-Dealer sports reporter Rich Exner that produced the most foolish string of words. Exner’s comment (see above) came some time after Diadiun had railed against the bloggers and aggregators who, it seems, routinely steal the hard work of Cleveland Plain-Dealer staffers, and some time before the very same Diadiun refused to answer an e-mailer who wanted to know of a single case in which one of these thieving bloggers or aggregators had posted a larger excerpt of Plain-Dealer content than is allowed under current laws.

So let’s just boil that all down: Diadiun, like many people in newsrooms, is upset that the Internet traffic his paper ostensibly deserves ends up going to sites that merely link to the Plain-Dealer’s stories. As far as it goes, this is a reasonable thing to be upset about. It hinges on an eminently reasonable premise: The people who gather news should reap the profits that come from people reading the news.

So try to reconcile that with what Exner said. Here it is again: “Even the Dan Rather thing or some of the videos that showed up with one of the presidential candidates, OK that might have originated at a blog, but when did the public really find out about it? Did they find out about it from the blog or did they find out about it when the newspapers and major networks and so forth repeated what the blogs had reported?”

Got that?

* When blogs get a scoop, newspapers are the most important link in the chain.

* When newspapers get a scoop, newspapers are the most important link in the chain.

Is Exner a bad guy? Is he, to use Rosen’s parlance, the worst sports-reporter-turned-make-believe-pundit I know of in American newspapers? I doubt it.

Where Exner is concerned, I think we’re seeing nothing more than the latest proof of the phenomenon that gives Jon Stewart so much of his material: If you point a camera at someone and ask him to talk and talk and talk, he will usually get around to contradicting himself or defying common sense or collapsing into incoherence. This is why 24-hour TV news is so rife with nonsense.

Just because technology makes something possible does not mean it is a good idea. Newspapers should not debase themselves and their standards by producing and posting stream-of-consciousness videos like this one.