Media Thoughts

Blogs are to inspire, to rant, to tell you how-to. They are passionate, or practical, and appeal to the emotions.

Newspapers are to inform, to tell you what is going on. They should give you new information and include original reporting. They should be more than a yahoo summary, and more than a reporter searching blogs and news online at his desk. We can do that ourselves! If the story is top notch, it should offer inside analysis that only that reporter, who was on the ground, talked to people, and knows more than he could ever include in his story, could know, and he should weave that in.

Magazines are to inform, with a point of view. They are personal, but also include reporting. They should be deeply reported, but so well-written that you barely register you are taking in the facts and figures. The smooth, colorful narrative makes those facts slide down like honey hiding the medicine.

Books are everything, the top of the heap, meant to inspire, to draw on emotions, to tell great stories, to do analysis, and to do original research and reporting that you have never seen, or to illuminate corners of the psyche like a philosopher or a sociologist, bringing to light parts of ourselves we recognize, but could not have articulated. They are just familiar, like a dream.

Which do you like to read? Which do you like to write?

Do you agree with me?