Mainstream media collapse gathers speed—and why that matters to you - Denyse O'Leary

Recently, analyst Victor Davis Hanson observed that, not only is our world changing radically but it is changing radically very quickly.

 Nowhere is this more true than in the world of mainstream print media, where legacy organizations are collapsing much more quickly than many of us would have expected, raising the question of—what’s a writer to do? How can a writer make a living?

Especially, how can a student with real writing talent, who aspires to be a non-fiction writer, fulfil the dream? It’s possible, but it requires clear and creative thinking.

 First, many who rail against the media get the cause of their problems all wrong: That is, we hear that the media are too left-wing or too right-wing or too shallow or too whatever. Nope.

Well, maybe true, depending on your perspective, but irrelevant.

Historically, media marketed information as well as opinion, and the Internet has now made most information free. As a result, advertisers, who were always the major financial support of most media, are dropping in numbers and willingness to pay, and subscribers are simply going online to find information—including the information from advertisers.

 Even oldsters like me are onto this now: If I would like to buy an oil-filled space heater from the local hardware chain, why should I scan the papers, hoping to find it in one of their ads when I can just go to their site and search on “space heaters”?

 When I started working on this post, I had one example of mainstream media decline, and then suddenly, two, then three, then four. But first, from Hanson:

Why Christian media must be part of the new media or die - Denyse O'Leary

In "Why liberals fell for ‘Muslim lesbian blogger’ hoax" (OC Register, June 17, 2011), Mark Steyn tells a story that shows why current Big Media won't likely recover from their current tailspin:

On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog "A Gay Girl In Damascus" had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, "Miss Brooks" and "Miss Arraf" were colleagues. "Amina" had posted at LezGetReal before starting "A Gay Girl In Damascus." As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:"Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian."

It got so crazy that three armed thugs were supposed to have captured "Amina" and a Free Amina Facebook page sprang up. Until, that is, the construction worker outed the college student ... then got outed himself.

Front and centre: Media would have ignored these Yankee guys except that they were pretending to be gay Muslim girls and media had no means of establishing the facts. So they were all-day suckers.

(Meanwhile, in news no one notices, Syria's government killed 19 protestors at the biggest rallies yet ... )

Mark's right to say that "'Amina Arraf' is nothing more than the projection of parochial obsessions on to distant lands Western liberals are too lazy to try to figure out." But it's more than that: Today's media are obsessed with their writers' concerns, not their readers.

Blog comments - Nesdoly

In our new reality of feedback on newspaper articles and comments on blogs, we all welcome interaction — or do we? I have, in the last while, activated comment moderation (an option which lets me view the comment first before deciding whether or not to publish it) on several of the blogs I write. That's because though comments can be a great way to get to know readers and interact with them, they can also work against you and your blog.

There are three types of comments I've encountered lately that I haven't published:

1. Comments in foreign languages
Someone routinely posts comments in Chinese characters to my mural blog. I've been able to translate some of these: they're usually harmless sayings or proverbs. However, I don't have the time to sleuth out what language they're in, or what they say. So I've posted a comment policy directly under the blog's banner to the effect that foreign language comments won't be published. (However, they keep coming anyway; maybe they're posted by a bot)

2. Comments with links
If someone I know has linked a relevant article, definition or some such in a comment, I will publish with no second thought. But often the links within or following comments are pure advertising, lead to questionable sites, or may even whisk one away  to malicious places (who knows... I refuse to click on them and neither do I want my readers to fall into any traps). Of course I'm not talking signature/name links created when you sign in to Google etc. to access the comment feature.

3. Comments that work against the purpose of the blog
This last category is tricky. As an example, I got a comment on Bible Drive-Thru the other day. It was in response to this post about tithing. Here's what the commenter said:

"The tithe was NOT a tenth of everything the people owned. God defined His tithe in Leviticus 27:30-33 to be a tenth of the crops and animals in herds and flocks. NO other animals were tithed on.


The poor did NOT tithe. Every TENTH animal was tithed. IF they only had nine new-born animals that year, there was NO tithe.


The poor actually RECEIVED from the tithe. The three-year tithe was FOR THE POOR.


Wage earners did not tithe. Jesus did not tithe. Paul did not tithe. Peter did not tithe. ONLY Israelite farmers could tithe.


The New Testament teaches generous, sacrificial giving, from the heart, according to our means. For some, $1 might be a sacrifice, while for others, even giving 50% of their income might not induce a sacrifice. In the Old Testament, ONLY the farmers tithed, and it was equal percentage (a tenth). The New Testament teaches the principle of equal sacrifice instead of equal percentage. Equal sacrifice is much harder to achieve, if not impossible, than giving ten percent."

To his credit, the commenter's posted name was linked to a website so I was able to check him out. I found that he was a financial adviser who considered himself an expert on tithing — in fact claimed to have special Holy Spirit teaching on the subject.

What to do? His first point was well taken. As I reread my post, I realized one of my statements was probably not defensible. So I changed it. (I had first written: "The tithe was one tenth of everything the people owned." I changed it to: "A tithe is one tenth.")

Otherwise:
- His tone was chippy (note the words in caps).
- His ideas were somewhat controversial (at least to me).
- I sensed that because he considered himself an expert, dialogue would probably not be possible.

What tipped my decision to not publish his comment, though, was the fact that Bible Drive-Thru is a blog for children. I felt I could defend my post as orthodox the way it stood (though perhaps not to his satisfaction), and I didn't want this blog to become the scene of an adult theological argument. (Had I received such a comment on an adult-reader blog, I most likely would have published it.)

Did I make the right decision? What are your comment denial criteria? Do you have a comment policy page posted on your blog? Does it help?

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Website: www.violetnesdoly.com

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