Yesterday the New York Times asked me to comment on Michael Kinsley's reimagination of the LA Times editorial page for this article.
But being on West Coast time (and spending the afternoon frolicking with
the kids at the pool) I responded too late and missed the deadline.
Since the first rule of the blogosphere is that no thought should go
unpublished, I am duly required to post it here instead.
Kinsley (full disclosure: I wrote for him a few times at Slate and the New Republic, and we're both Economist alumni) has one of the tougher problems in media transformation. The newspaper op-ed pages may have once been the main forum for national debate, but the marketplace for opinion has changed over the past decade. Between talk radio and blogging, there has been an absolute explosion of punditry, rendering the op-ed pages largely irrelevant. What to do?
His solution
is a mix of public debate and public participation, including something
he calls a "wikitorial" that will allow readers to revise editorials to
their liking online. The editor's note isn't long, so you might want to
read it to get a flavor of the plan. My take is that it seems like a
healthily radical experiment to try, and about the only thing I could
imagine that would get me to read a newspaper op-ed again.
If you'll forgive the blog triumphalism, Kinsley's plan seems to draw heavily from blog-culture conventions. Examples include:
- A human (ie, non-institutional, non-bossy) voice, ranging from the editor's note itself to A SoCal Life, which is meant to be personal reflections on LA living.
- Publicly acknowledging internal disagreement.
- Encouraging audience participation (wikitorials).
- Links to comment elsewhere, in the form of critiques of other newspaper op-eds.
- A willingness to offer incomplete thinking, acknowledged as such, on the hope that the public exercise will result in a better exploration of the issues.
It remains to be seen if this will actually work, bringing life to a dull page in a declining medium. But if anyone can pull it off, it's Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate and a refreshingly independent thinker. I suspect I'll never see that page in its paper form again, but it would be great to see more of the paid pundits of this world duking it out online.
Much as I applaud the idea of an online editorial forum, I can't help but be sceptical about it's usefulness. Let's face it, there is an overwhelming number of ignorant bigots in cyberspace peddling opinions that are no more than entrenched political bias. It's bad enough trying to wade through the blogosphere to find common sense. Would you really be tempted to return to the op-ed pages to plow through the ill-informed rantings of every Jeff Gannon out there?
Posted by: billy | June 14, 2005 at 12:51 AM