Jardin de l'Internet
[PARIS] Need to access the net, print that document and burn that CD while visiting Paris? You won't do better than the Jardin de l'Internet at 79 Boulevard Saint Michel. Twenty minutes online on any of it's twenty computers, will cost you one euro. Along with several b/w printers, a colour laser printer and a scanner, the shop offers a CD burning service (CD included) for euro 9.80. It's open seven days a week, and if you tire of cyberspace, you can sit outside, order a coffee and read the sports newspaper L'Equipe, while watching the people sunning themselves in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
L'Equipe is filled today with features on "L'Am鲩cain Lance Armstrong", and in a rather nice bit of wordplay that revolves around his name, the lead story is titled "L'AS DES AS" (the ace of the aces). One of the good things about the paper version of L'Equipe is that it is free of the pop-up ads that make the site a bit of a chore at times.
One of the good things about the net is that it puts the world at our fingertips, and so The New York Times is just a click away. Today, we see this front-page story: "Year of the Blog? Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps." The only sour note in this upbeat piece is provided by Thomas McPhail, a professor of media studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "I think that bloggers have put the issue of professionalism under attack," he told the Times. "They have no pretense to objectivity. They don't cover both sides," he adds, while arguing that bloggers aren't journalists because they lack professional credentials. Do credentials make a person professional? Does a salary from a newspaper make a person a journalist? I don't think so. Anyway, what are credentials at bottom but an attempt by the professions to raise the drawbridges and keep the hordes outside the walls?
Make up your own mind about the professionalism of the bloggers at the Democratic National Convention by visiting the community site they have set up in Boston. Me? I'm off to London, a city that would shock Professor Thomas McPhail as most of its journalists don't appear to be the least bit interested in objectivity and quite a few of them, one suspects, had their credentials run up on a photocopier down Brick Lane. Still, they're very entertaining characters, and some of them have actually helped make this a better world.
Comments
"They have no pretense to objectivity. They don't cover both sides," Professor McPhail unwittingly hit the nail on the head. Most professional journalists, at least those writing for "liberal" papers, have a well honed pretense to objectivity.
Political Bloggers are more akin to op-ed writers, who at least pin their colours to the mast.
Posted by: Edmund Burke | July 26, 2004 12:06 PM
America's political conventions are covered by the several thousand professional journalists, ranging from mainstream press to every local news station and cable channel.
They're all looking for color, and story, and blather on and on, either cynically or too sweetly.
Is this is what will be threatened by folk reporting back their own thoughts about what they see and think?
Surely the bloggers cannot begin to approach the silliness of the mass media professionals who will report much and tell us little that we don't already know.
Posted by: don | July 26, 2004 10:41 PM