Especially when the elite's journalistic production (e.g. WP articles) are not really higher quality: just follow some long established conventions, are self-congratulatory, follow the norms of polite talk, try to not ask the "wrong" (elite-wise) questions, put into use all the BS they've learned on "essay/creative writing" class, etc, which is why they pass for "serious" by people conditioned to seek those traits.
WP isn't "the elites". They're journalists. They have a trade, which is on a completely different plane and set of standards than a random blog.
Much of it however, is not.
That's because I have about 15+ years experience with it (until relatively recently) from various roles (and family in the business).
>They have a trade, which is on a completely different plane and set of standards than a random blog.
From a random blog, yes. From a good blog, no. And there was no real training required in being a journalist (the same there is in engineering for example), anybody could become one (and even worse today) no matter how ignorant about the topic they cover. What little exists "school of journalism" style education used to laughed at by old school journalists (and not the worse ones either) -- and still doesn't make you an expert in politics, or tech, or whatever you get to cover.
>WP isn't "the elites". They're journalists.
Still the ten-percenters (or percenter wanna-bees), and all commingling with the elites and eating their crumbs.
This is nonsense unless you think the only training of value happens in post-graduate degree programs. Journalists get a huge amount of on-the-job practical training.
Just look at programming and software engineering. It takes very little to call yourself a programmer, and on-the-job training may or may not help at all.
Both good and bad journalists could be produced on the other end of it -- even on the same newspaper. Now consider on different, low quality, newspapers (e.g. on the job training on some gossip rag). Still, you get to call yourself a journalist, like someone who slaps together some shitty PHP code from Stack Overflow answers is a "programmer".
It's perhaps also worth noting that blogs and professional journalism aren't actually distinct anymore.
At one end, news organizations started hosting blogs under their main domains, often not clearly identified as such. The bloggers get big-name prestige and the appearance of being contracted journalists, the news orgs get free content and click-attracting stories that can be disclaimed if they're inaccurate or improper.
At the other end, Vice News has multiple Peadbody awards. Emptywheel exists. Notable, award-winning journalists like Marcy Wheeler and Nate Thayer publish on their own sites, without editors, then link up with news orgs later to publish books or take contracts for specific stories. (And, yeah, sometimes those people break completely with journalistic practice. Wheeler outed a source, then gave a detailed account of her ethical justification. Thayer may or may not be completely off the deep end.) Neither of them works for a major outlet, but both of have worked for major outlets, so it's hardly clear how to score either the positive or negative aspects of that.
Comparing the Washington Post to a blog is hard to do, because there's no particular guarantee that the two are on different sites, or by different authors.
This may be the first real argument I've seen for the difference between blogging and journalism.
Blogging is one person's opinion or account of a topic.
Journalism is one person's opinion or account of a topic, as filtered, reviewed, revised, challenged, fact-checked, and approved by an organization.
It's reasonable to expect an individual to be able to decide whether they trust a handful of news organizations. If the NYT repeatedly breaks my trust, I can remove them from my reading list. But until then, I trust that the NYT to vet their writers. So I trust the authors published on nytimes.com without knowing a thing about them, because I trust the NYT. (Likewise, if I mistrust the org, I'll mistrust the contributors. Hello there, Fox News.)
It's not reasonable to expect individuals to be able to decide how much they trust each individual writer. I don't even know how many writers I read on a daily basis.
When it's a blogger, I take it with a grain of salt unless it's someone I read so often that I've come to trust them. (Hello, Jason Kottke.)
This doesn't make blogging inferior to journalism. I probably get more value from blogs than news sites on the regular. But I do think it's a valid distinction to take into account.
This is probably the best argument I know of for having journalistic 'institutions'. Gellman Amnesia is a real thing, and very hard to solve for any topic where you're not an expert. But if a source manages to provide a predictable level of quality over many stories, it's suddenly possible to use the topics you know as a way to predict the quality of everything else.
Of course, the downside of that is the way it creates confidence that can then be abused, and in particular the risk that everyday accuracy will provide an aegis for misrepresenting topics which people can't fact-check. Functionally, it's something like the SSL chain-of-trust problem; the tradeoff for being able to trust things we can't personally inspect is having a system which propagates any claim that gets past the weakest gatekeeper involved.
I don't think it's very common for journalism orgs to go off the rails completely, and when they do people eventually catch up to the loss of quality. Rather, I worry about trusted names being manipulated to spread stories without showing proper evidence. If you're running Theranos and know actual scientists would laugh at your data, or you're promoting the invasion of Iraq and know no one can challenge your "classified evidence", the name of a trusted news source becomes a welcome road to legitimacy. And instead of convincing a bunch of reputable blogs or analysts who each have their own reputation on the line, you can shop a claim until someone bites and then start using their output to convince further voices.
(There's an interesting debate hidden in there about source anonymity: keeping sources anonymous from other journalists, even after they're proven dishonest, allows them to try out a lie repeatedly without being caught. It's a tough problem.)
As you say, most of my favorite sources are either bloggers or specific writers I trust by name instead of organization. But there's a lot to be said for delinking "knows and writes about a topic" from "has strong verification practices and a reputation to risk"; there are just too many interesting stories to rely on personal reputation for every one of them.
On a related note, Michael Lewis has an excellent podcast called _Against the Rules_, and one of the episodes focuses on what happens when we can't trust the referee. In this case, the referees in question were scholars entrusted with deciding whether classic works of art were legitimately painted by the artists they claim to have been painted by (like a da Vinci).
I won't go on too much about it, other than to say in this discussion of podcasts and trusting journalists, there happens to be a great podcast about the challenge of trust. We have to trust SOMEONE, but so often that trust is abused.
(And a nice touch that we're now full-circle to the topic of podcasts.)
They should get a summer trainee who has been in a band, or even watch a youtube video on how to do podcasts. It should be easy to set up a normal microphone and put some foam rubber on the wall. And please, do get all the people in the same room!
But the content can actually be good - ie some enthusiastic reporters actually know widely about their subject and can discuss it in an interesting way. Vi Hart of youtube fame was invited to a journalist conference and was saying just the same - that we need good quality journalism and content should be front and center - and stop with the gimmicks and forced video features.
Often easier said than done. As I wrote elsewhere, I definitely prefer to be in the same room as the person I'm interviewing for both technical and conversational reasons. But it can really limit the number of people you can get on a show--even more so if it has to be in your studio.
Lots of people record podcasts and videos at events like conferences (partly for this reason). Sure, the audio isn't pristine but IMO it's perfectly listenable if done right. I gave up stressing about getting perfect studio sound years ago.
That does add to the work but it's not bad for a 15-20 minute interview.
The thing I'd like to see which I guess falls into the "seems easier than it is" bucket is software that automatically stripped out common verbal tics like "umm" and "you know." Cleaning up at least some of those and equalizing all the volumes probably takes most of my time editing a podcast.
I haven't looked recently to see if there's anything else out there as I don't have a podcast at the moment.
On the Mac for example, Garageband comes with a free compressor plugin -- and even EQ presets for "spoken voice" like material.
But you can also find free VST compressors -- you'll then need an audio plugin host. Audacity can do that too.