Aren’t there plenty of hunting and gun magazines out there for the “enthusiasts” to buy if they so chose? What you’re seeking is a tacit acceptance of the gun culture. A newspaper runs a car article or column because everyone (most everyone) has drive a car. But, guns as part of the mainstream is a matter of debate. You don’t think sending someone like yourselves to cover any and all gun stories would color the issue?

Meanwhile, read this:
http://www.theindependentutsa.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&uStory_id=0420e45b-6ae1-4c78-966e-e8be5c170012

newspapers should create blogs as many have, says La Shawn Barber…….

The generation who came home and fired up the evening news first thing every night is moving on, the ones that came after them either don’t care about the news or get it from other sources. Newspapers are in trouble because of these and other reasons,…

If all my high-school and college opinions were available to every relative, potential date and employer at the touch of a button? Sheesh. If every potentially heated debate with a political adversary had to be abandoned out of concern that my tone would embarass my grandchildren in sixty years? Or that my expression of my views, easily searchable, could cause some liberal school teacher to take a special interest in “deprogramming” my children?! Forget it.

If newspapers ever do require real names, then, at the least, it is necessary that they be non-searchable and have a relatively short life span, after which they get purged from the net.

Pinch and the other MSM boys just don’t understand this very simple point. It appears they would rather die trying to influence our thinking….then applying the Benjamin Franklin business model.

If newspapers stuck to “The 5 W’s” they might do better.

And if my aunt had a mustache, she’d be my uncle.

Another example of shoddy journalism made worse through willful ignorance is the coverage afforded to firearms by the MSM. The so-called reporters need detailed instructions, starting with: “The pointy end goes AWAY from you.”

They don’t know the difference between a semi-automatic and a fully automatic weapon, can’t tell a revolver from an autoloading pistol, and write grand editorials based upon their idea that a 7.62 bullet coming out of a black rifle is ever so much more lethal than the same bullet coming out of a woodgrained-and-blued rifle. They bandy about terms like “assault rifle” and “Saturday night special” without having the smallest clue what those terms mean, or more precisely what they do not mean.

And the worst part of this ignorance is that today’s MSM “reporters” see no problem with their ignorance, because their J-school taught them that “making a difference” is what counts, not accurately reporting facts.

If I were in charge of reforming journalism, I would do away with the j-school degree. It’s a ridiculous idea. I took the classes, and learned nothing there that I would not have learned in the newsroom or in the field.

Instead I think to work a “beat,” the reporter should be able to demonstrate subject-matter expertise. Or at least have a working knowledge of the area they’re covering–and prove themselves willing to become more knowledgeable.

For example, no reporter who doesn’t know the scientific method should be permitted to cover science stories. That reporter won’t know what questions to ask, or could get taken in by a “cold fusion” type scam, or might get the facts but garble them in the transmission to the reader (confuse fission vs. fusion or theory vs. hypothesis for instance).

I had thought my idea was how it worked in practice, so I figured out what beats interested me and decided to take classes towards understanding the fundamentals: criminal justice classes in case I had to write about crime and cops, foreign language classes, tech classes to write about computers and so on. Well rounded liberal arts with an emphasis on certain subjects that would help me cover preferred beats.

It turned out that reporters could go report on a country without being expected to know the language or the culture.

A military man complained to the Washington Times recently about their reporter confusing ranks and their abbreviations–a few years ago it never would have occurred to me that a reporter who didn’t know those details could get assigned stories about the military. Don’t I feel naive!

This looks like a top down problem: if the editor doesn’t know anything, they can’t pull a James Kilpatrick (in one class we would read reprints of his columns; very educational). If they can’t emulate him, I don’t foresee a bright future for them.

I just realized who else refers to himself in the third person…Elmo!

Tickle Me Machine doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?

I don’t really want comments connected with my paper. To me the paper stands alone, with the blogging world functioning as the sounding board and counterpoint. Why should papers do badly what the wider blog world does well?

Also, I like the online version to track the physical version, but offer more (in terms of additional source material and depth).

But I don’t think we will be well served if newspapers died out. We would all be sitting around with little to blog about.

I thinking blogging and newspapers actually work well as contrasts to each other, each doing slightly different things, with different energy, while also impacting each other.

NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

A troubled newspaper industry is beset with a raging journalistic debate around using the Internet to bolster the bottom line for the nation’s broadsheets.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Faced with declining circulat…

The lesser of the two errors is that they have essentially abandoned “who, what, when, and where” in favor of “why”. That comes partly from hubris, yes, but even more so from economic considerations. Opinion is cheap compared to keeping a decent reporter–someone who can and does dig for the first four “W”s–in the field. Unfortunately for them, opinion is also a buyer’s market, and that’s what really hurts about the Internet. Paying a Krugman six figures is just a loss when you can get umpteen similar opinions for free.

But the worst error, the one that’s really killing them, is “if it bleeds it leads.” They note that when something startling or amazing comes up, they get more readers. From this they conclude that the only way to do “news” is to continually startle and amaze the readers. Part of the problem with that is habituation — it turns into a loser’s game of “top this if you can!” — but more importantly, it turns the sophisticated readers off. If the movers and shakers read your paper other people will go along in the hope that some of the status will rub off. If nobody’s reading except the mouth-breathers who get all excited about J-Lo’s boyfriends, the sophisticated are run off twice, once by the content and once by the association.

Bias makes it worse by cutting the remaining audience in half, but the other two effects are primary. If they fixed those the bias would repair itself.

Regards,
Ric