TMZ and Gawker: the Case for Transcendental Media

I had the pleasure of reading Gawker’s play-by-play of Harvey Levin’s visit to the J-school.

Comments after the article included one about Columbia “stooping low” in inviting Levin, and a bit about  “paparazzi=journalists? Ah the dumbing down of America strikes again.”

I listened intently to Harvey. I listened because he has a business model that works, and that’s no easy feat whether the content is about The Hills or Capitol Hill.  We spend so much time debating what journalism should be that we fail to notice what it is.

It is not the news that needs to change but the paradigm in which we examine it.  Are we the first generation to experience a radical shift in the way information is disseminated? Highbrow and lowbrow entertainment are no longer separated by a vast chasm of social and class differences. Media – our access to it and the expediency with which it travels – fills the void.

The issue is much larger than entertainment news watering down hard news or bloggers diminishing the credibility of reporters – it is the consumers becoming the producers. It is user generated content, citizen journalists, sending eyewitness pictures taken with a cell phone camera over twitter and getting picked up by AP, and bloggers who have influence not because they are going to win Pulitzers but because they are widely read. It is accessibility and exposure. It is reality television making a celebrity out of the average Joe. It is Ashton Kutcher twittering sans an agent or publicists’ approval that makes the average Joe accessible to a celebrity.

Why don’t we just accept that these hybrid forms of distilling entertainment and information are not to be written off nor defined as authentic journalism just yet? They need to come in to their own, but until then why not explore them? Why don’t we stop caring what were are or we aren’t and invite the head of the top celebrity news site to a distinguished journalism school simply because we need to listen?

Journalists do not exist in a vacuum.  What good would it to do staunchly defend entrenched ways of thinking about news and newspapers simply because that’s the way things have always been? That’s an awfully conservative notion, and that’s something that journalism, as an institution, has never been.

We like boxed wine and fancy champagne. We can shop at Target and Bloomingdales. These ideas are not revolutionary. Why should they been seen as transgressive when applied to journalism?  A site like Gawker (see blogroll) could only exist in a fractured, hybridized, communal media world anyway. And in my opinion, that’s a good thing.

To compartmentalize – and therefore to close oneself off -  in a medium (the internet) and an industry (the media) that is fluid and open by its very nature is to contradict precisely what makes it successful. It is career suicide.