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Monday, February 9, 2015

Glenn Greenwald v. Bill Keller on "the future of journalism"

I forgot to post this last week, but it's even more relevant now given that Ch. 6 opens with Glenn Greenwald and activist journalism.

This is long and about a year and a half old, but a very interesting back and forth between Greenwald and Keller on the topics of legacy journalism institutions, business models (Greenwald has since started his own independent publication, The Intercept), and Greenwald's views on partisanship and activism in journalism, which critique the "view from nowhere" model of supposedly-objective journalism that attempts, usually unsuccessfully, to eradicate the person reporting the news and present "just the story." Greenwald doesn't think that's really possible, and finds the failures of that system dangerous.

Here's the intro to the piece:

Much of the speculation about the future of news focuses on the business model: How will we generate the revenues to pay the people who gather and disseminate the news? But the disruptive power of the Internet raises other profound questions about what journalism is becoming, about its essential character and values. This week’s column is a conversation — a (mostly) civil argument — between two very different views of how journalism fulfills its mission. 
Glenn Greenwald broke what is probably the year’s biggest news story, Edward Snowden’s revelations of the vast surveillance apparatus constructed by the National Security Agency. He has also been an outspoken critic of the kind of journalism practiced at places like The New York Times, and an advocate of a more activist, more partisan kind of journalism. Earlier this month he announced he was joining a new journalistic venture, backed by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who has promised to invest $250 million and to “throw out all the old rules.” [The InterceptI invited Greenwald to join me in an online exchange about what, exactly, that means.

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