It also helps to go after powerful people you deal with or may have to deal with. We are all petty, vicious folk, and pseudonymity allows one to isolate social, business, and political spheres for the overall profit of all.

Jeff: good point and pretty helpful too. I guess I’m one of the editorialists to whom your advice is addressed, being editor of a new multi-voiced blog for a media company. (The Cluetrain and your blog are great supports b.t.w.)

Speaking as one of the people stepping up the the mantle (http://fifthestate.co.uk/author/katehyde/), let me say achieving what you propose is a really tough – sometimes terrifying – move to pull off successfully. It’s just not a case of lacking ‘cowardice’; it requires a determination (almost recklessness!) to push through the the established culture of anonymous editorials from traditional media companies.

As editor for a blog hosted by an institution you must to some extent represent the voice of that place, but of course, by definition, your voice is yours and yours alone (hence in my case my really emabarassing photo to ID me); honesty and integrity is everything.

Being brazen and free sounds great until you realise the MD and the communications dept are scrutinising your every word.

But you’re right; you can’t expect people to engage with you if you don’t with them, and evolution of the editorial is crucial. 3 days in to the job, the jury’s out whether I’ve succeeded or am headed for a P45 for speaking my mind, but you’ll see from the manifesto, we’re at least trying. (I use the ‘we’ with justification here – it’s a group effort)

nicely put, Undertoad.

> “Partsch goes on to continue his criticism of too many editorials, badly done, and says that some are so bad they might as well be abandoned to try something new.”

What will be the agent of these editorials’ abandonment? Who, with control of that space, would voluntarily give it up?

I’m told the Inuit refer to the wolf as “the knife that carves the caribou”; what will carve the editorials?

Answers: accountability, and exposure to the battle of ideas. If the writer doesn’t have to show himself or defend his reasoning, the prospects for improvement are dubious.
(yeah, I’m using “him” as a bit of an insult here; women I think would not be so fearful)

“As long as the editorials are poorly reasoned, suspiciously motivated tracts lobbed down from the castle parapets, the townsfolk will rightly view the paper with mistrust”

If bloggers are so inconsequential, then, why does Frank Partsch feel so compelled to respond to one? I have to assume that the irony is totally missed on him. I doubt that he has very much experience with the bloggers.

I would direct him to the Belmont Club, which on some topics have had many hundreds of comments, comments of quality and thoughtfulness. Maybe he should scurry over to the Brussels Journal covering the EU or a Canadian blog, Small Dead Animals……..I could name many more sites in cyberspace, as can most of us, where intelligent content and commentary by citizens is gratifyingly democratic, intelligent and, most importantly, interactive. Not that there aren’t site with drive-by grafiti, but, that’s ok too. The content on tv and in print isn’t that great.

Could Frank Partsch point to a place in the MSM universe where this discussion could be held without censorship and immediate access?

He can’t, because there isn’t, and never will be. Ironic, isn’t it, that Partsch’s piece was behind a paid wall.

The only reason that editorials survived and prospered over the years was because there was no mechanism to adequately contest them. Technology has exposed editorial boards for their biases, their lapses of judgment, and their inaccuracies. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that the Editorial and Op-Ed pages are more important to a daily newspaper than actual news; you think there’s a reason all those Very Important Institutional Pieces are never crowded by display advertising on the page?

An institution may have authority, but it is not trusted.

An institution may broadcast a message but it cannot have a conversation with you.

We are finding the limits of a deficient form that was born out of necessity. And now we’re unlimiting ourselves.

1. “Is there a difference between the voice of John685@blogoworld.net (my apologies if there is one) and the voice of the New York Times? You bet — it’s the New York Times.”

2. “The strength of newspaper editorial pages lies less in what we say on any given subject on any given day than it does in how we shape the community agenda over time.”

The first comment shows the disdain of the old media to the new media. They just can’t stand the fact that they are no longer the only game in town. All their money, all their power, and all their influence can be swept away by a guy in his pajamas and a keyboard (ala Drudge runs with the Monica story which Newsweek had been sitting on for months). How can they ever learn to change if they disregard the very thing that is making them obsolete?

This leads to the second comment which shows that they consider it a strength to shape the community agenda over time. In this age of individual opinion, I consider it a major weakness of old media that they bow down before their corporate masters and only run what the publisher allows. Corporate held media empires seem more driven by shaping community agendas than providing informative news. You can quickly determine their bias by the facts they conveniently omit in their pursuit to shape our opinion. Quite frankly it smacks of endless propaganda vs. informative news. Thus the editor sitting up in the ivory tower scheming to shape the community agenda over time gets ignored over the individual blogger. This misconception of the instituitional corporate voice being a strength seems deeply rooted in their world view. Who really needs to absorb more slick PR and marketing and spin in today’s time? Who really needs more consistent groupthink of the same opinion repeated over and over?

Finally, letters to the Op/Ed page has got to be the lamest defense of why they don’t need to blog or interact. By the time the letter is published the Op/Ed is long forgotten and yesterday’s news. This makes them appear out of touch and clueless and extremely dated. Why is it so hard for them to understand that people want real time feedback?

We disdain the privilege of the press pass.

We oppose editorial features without face, afraid of fingerprint.

News royalty must take off their hoods for you wear nothing of value.

We demand old media should learn from new – TV anchors are faces of institutions incarnate.

We think the letters from the named should be in larger print than the unnamed. And let us chose the fonts of our own character.

We are not the Public, but single letter writers, one at a time. You are public and plural. We respect identity.

We will report on everything and boldly go, brazenly see, and risk our being where you will not.

Networks must measure and display their audience so We have the power to change the pie chart of our most common budget.

We will write our own letters, we will write, for We are the willing.

As a ranking member of the Creel Committee in the Wilson administration, Lippman and his cronies (including the father of public relations, Edward Bernays) were charged with convincing the public that it was in the country’s best interests to enter World War I. This event heralded the beginning of a new hegemony in journalism, and Lippmann was its author.

But Lippmann was a social engineer first, and we know that by studying (and deconstructing) his writings. In Lippmann’s mind, people were incapable of governing themselves, a job he felt was better suited to an educated elite class, among which he included journalists. Here’s a fun paragraph from his book The Phantom Public:

“A false ideal of democracy can only lead to disillusionment and to meddlesome tyranny. If democracy cannot direct affairs, then a philosophy which expects it to direct them will encourage the people to attempt the impossible; they will fail…The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”

So this “institutional voice” of which Partsch speaks is cloaked in an elitist arrogance birthed in putting the herd-like public in its place. Is there any wonder the public — now armed with their own printing presses — is fighting back?

As our culture continues its drift from modernism to postmodernism, the institutions that are given “special” status through license, position or protected knowledge are all threatened. I don’t think we really want to lose any voice, so I’m not one of those critics who think the institutional press should just go away.

I just want to see them put in their place.