“a nation talking to itself”

Today I added feeds in the sidebar with headline news from both the New York Times and the Huffington Post. They represent converging ideas on how we gather, prioritize, and distribute news, but more importantly, how we as a citizens go about fulfilling our obligation as participants in democracy.

The Times is our "newspaper of record'" built on Walter Lippmann's model of professionalism and objectivity; "an American newspaper... designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity."

The Huffington Post is a non-print offspring of the Internet which fulfills Arthur Miller's description of a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself.” It aligns with John Dewey's ideas that "the foundation of democracy ... was less information than conversation. Members of a democratic society needed to cultivate what the journalism scholar James W. Carey, in describing the debate, called “certain vital habits” of democracy—the ability to discuss, deliberate on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it toward consensus." Indeed, one post at Huffington can lead to thousands of responses and hundreds of threads.

This article in the New Yorker explores the voice of emerging online "newspapers" in the context of declining print editions and role we expect the press to play in framing the news for our consumption / understanding / discussion. It's a good read.

Meanwhile, I will continue to straddle both media (LMS = Library Media Straddler?).

(As a footnote to the convergence, take a look at the inside first pages of the print Times. Recently, it has greatly expanded its snapshot summaries that used to occupy a few column inches. Now they sprawl to page three looking ever so much more like the home page of their online site.)