Journalists and fans

I usually catch at auto at the same intersection every morning. It's a popular intersection, and it just so happened today that the person next to me was also trying to catch an auto. We were going to the same area, so I invited him to share.

He asked me where I worked, so I told him the paper's name. He got very excited and started telling me about an idea he's been proposing to every newspaperperson he's ever met. Basically he thinks the government should institute a 1% judicial tax, intended to go towards courts and help them resolve their 10-15 year backlogs of cases.

He's one of hundreds of people (so it seems, anyway) who've come up to me with ideas they think should go in the paper. When I mention what I do, people are eager to share these stories with me. Many of them don't even want credit for the idea, they just think it's so good it has to be made public. Sometimes I get anonymous email, sometimes letters postmarked from strange addresses in far corners of the globe. Sometimes it's friends at parties, other times strangers on public trains.

In J-school we used to make fun of those people who wound up in journalism because there was nothing else they wanted to do. But the nice thing about those types of journalists is that at least they don't forget they've been given an opportunity.

Journalists, especially the uber-successful ones who write influential opinion columns in major outlets, seem to me to have forgotten that they've been given a platform other people would once in a while like to share. They're a bit like the A-list actors whose cause I was discussing yesterday - these people all seem to believe that other people have a duty to listen to them, rather than the other way around. They feel smarter, more concerned about the world, more aware, and so they deserve to be the ones in the pulpit or onscreen. They want to lecture to their audience, but they're wary of actually engaging with them.

But that attitude of entitlement is not the way to win viewers. Perhaps that's why blogs are so popular. When you look at the top 10 blogs, they're all edited blogs. It's not that readers want poorly-written or inadequately sourced material. Maybe they just want to read someone who actually cares that they're still out there.