If you can ignore Michael Wolff's distracting, ad hominem attacks against David Carr -- calling him, among other things, "semi-retarded" -- there is a legitimate question buried in yesterday's polemic. Apparently, there's some rivalry between Carr, a media columnist for the Times, and Wolff, the founder of Newser, a content aggregator; Carr thinks Wolff undistinguished, and Wolff calls Carr "really quite a nitwit."
Okay, but what's important is not a pissing match between two middle-aged men, it's the worlds-apart worldviews espoused by these former colleagues about the state of American journalism.
"Let me not put too fine a point on this: newspapers suck," Wolff said in a phone interview this morning -- a somewhat rabid take on a familiar line: that new media is rightfully, and thankfully, supplanting old media.
Carr, by contrast, holds that newspapers have essential -- and perhaps inimitable -- strengths. "Sometimes," Carr writes, "people have to make the calls, hit the streets and walk past the conventional wisdom."
Rather than assess their respective characters (after all, Carr and Wolff have each other for that), let's consider the content of their reporting. I've surveyed the major columns that the two have written on the future of journalism since the New Year -- Carr for the Times, and Wolff for Newser -- and listed their sources (see the appendix below).
Carr has written four columns this year, in which he made 16 citations. Of those, five were personal interviews, 10 were citations from articles or speeches, and just one was a standalone link. He's obtained information from the Chairwoman of the SEC, the founders of Huffington Post, the Editor of the Wall Street Journal, executives of Google and the Associated Press, and authors, writers, analysts and bloggers.
In short, Carr has tried to interview and write about someone who represents almost everyone involved in, or touched by, the future of newspapers. And unlike colleague Richard Pérez-Pe?a, who covers newspapers extensively, Carr is a columnist, and not a beat reporter.
By comparison, Wolff has written 12 articles this year, in which he made 46 citations. Not a single one came from personal reporting.
Of the 46, eight were direct links to The New York Times website, one a direct link to the Los Angeles Times, one to the now-online only Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and another to Editor & Publisher, a journal about newspapers. 22 of Wolff's links point to internal Newser articles, which summarize or paraphrase other publications. Nine come from the Times, and 13 from other content-producing publications. Wolff also cites his own website nine times, and three of the links do not work.
In other words, Wolff depends entirely on working journalists -- and particularly those at the Times -- for evidence, unless he's referencing himself or a blank page.
"At Newser," Wolff writes, "we make the Times shorter. Meaning no disrespect to David Carr, the Newser version of his story is cleaner and quicker than the Times version." But without Carr's actual writing and reporting -- in this case, including quotations from an author, analyst and blogger -- there would be no "Newser version."
And that's the larger point here: in relentlessly attacking the Times in column after column, Wolff implicitly rejects the premise of his own website -- "that the Times...no longer puts out a necessary newspaper" -- by almost exclusively relying on the Graying Lady to make his point. Wolff can't source a blog without the Times, but we're supposed to renounce the paper?
(Wolff, for his part, says it's not a question of sourcing but rather a "question of being about.")
Wolff is convinced that the Times is dispensable, and that citizen journalists can fill the void. Yet do-it-yourself-ism is frowned on in almost every other profession: citizen policemen we call vigilantes; citizen doctors we call quacks; citizen bankers we call Ponzi schemers; and citizen musicians sing karaoke. Perhaps anyone can be a postal worker, and, as Wolff's site does, deliver the envelope -- but who's writing the news inside?
"Let a million flowers bloom, or whatever," Wolff said this morning, and one or many will take the Times' place. But as for just who these change agents are, Wolff admits, "I don't think we know the answer to that."
Wolff holds up Arthur Sulzberger, Bill Keller, and Carr as straw men, as incorrigible tree-killers, doddering fools, flacks and has-beens. What he fails to see, however, is that the newsmen aren't clinging to print for dear love, but for dear life. As Newser ably demonstrates, there's no working alternative yet -- and maybe not ever -- to traditional newsgathering, like that practiced by Carr.
It's hip for bloggers to bite the hand that feeds them, and Wolff's got some oral fixation. It's not good enough for him to kick the Boston Globe or Seattle Post-Intelligencer while they're down; he needs to cite their own articles while he's doing it. We all have a personal stake in The New York Times, but for Wolff it's more than that, it's his bread and butter. Without the news, he's just an -er.
