The Zeitgeist

With my friends over at the Alert Nerd collective debating the heady topic of what journalism is, especially when it comes to entertainment journalism, and stirring the pot over at The Beat, I admit to doing some thinking on the subject of late. And after having been pandered to for coverage by plenty of PR flacks and snubbed by others because my praise hasn’t been forthcoming enough, I have the same conclusion that Matt has - that the real journalism, the stuff that made me want to be a journalist when I was a kid, is long gone, if it ever existed at all outside of the intrepid hero-reporter of cinema past. I figured that out around the time that Slamdance gave me a quite-unsubtle brush-off while I was compiling a fair and comprehensive write-up of the sponsorship debacle at the the 2007 Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition. The article, which went live on eToychest about a month before it folded, no longer exists, though the transcripts of all the interviewing can still be found at Snackbar. Hmm, maybe I should repost it for nostalgia value.

Anyway, back to the point. I’m driving home from work today, and Steve Corbett, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s own gonzo journalist-cum-talk radio host is tearing into a caller who dares to tell Corbett that he’s not a journalist. Of course, he feels otherwise - and maybe I’m being a hypocrite but I only really use the word to sound fancy; I have no illusions - and he says, “Journalism is like art; you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.” Yes, I do too: fair, well-researched coverage that exists without an overwhelming amount of agenda exerting pressure upon it. Which is as likely as Joe Quesada receiving something resembling real fan approval.