Phil Luciano, a Peoria columnist, thinks he knows, and he may have touched a nerve. Responses to a recent column came from journalists around the country. Today he shares some of those e-mails. Here's a sample:
Fast-food journalism: I spent more than 20 years in the business, at the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and smaller dailies and weeklies. You still have good newspapers and reporters out there. But you run a bank, you get bankers and tellers. You run a fast-food joint, you get people flipping frozen burgers. You run a newspaper where the priority is raking in high profit margins for shareholders, where the stuff of life becomes the "daily product," where stories and layouts all look and read more or less the same, then you get a boring newspaper staffed by unimaginative, bank-tellers-turned-journalists. - Mark
Yuck: These days, the more controversial the fact, the more likely it will be rewritten by a gun-shy copy editor until it resembles nothing more exciting than yesterday's oatmeal. - The Morning Call, Allentown, Penn.
Indeed. Remember, these are journalists saying these things.
You run a newspaper where the priority is raking in high profit margins for shareholders, where the stuff of life becomes the 'daily product,'
where stories and layouts all look and read more or less the same, then you get a boring newspaper staffed by unimaginative, bank-tellers-turned-journalists.
In other words, you get USA Today.
And I'm an ex-journalist saying these things.