jeremy tessmer | curator & designer

Full disclosure: a real blogger who was really interested in developing “readership” would not put smart aleck quotes around the word readership probably save this post until tomorrow.  It is 11:19PM and the world has already heard too much from me already today.  On the other hand, the likelihood that I will find the time to write a blog post tomorrow is slender enough to squeeze into something called “Italian fit.”

And so it was that I decided to bemoan the state of journalism in 2010.

To begin with, there are guys like me, who have the same theoretical distribution as both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but who don’t have any real reason or qualification for adding to the daily cacophony of news and opinion.  I imagine a giant bar at 1AM.  Everyone has had a certain quantity of drinks beyond their usual limit.  It is the Hour of the Blowhard.  Positions are taken.  Awful soliloquies trap the callow and the introverted.  A few are looking for decent conversation, but many are just hoping to audition a new mattress.  Now imagine putting megaphones in everyone’s hands.  That is the blogosphere and it accounts, by word count if not by quality, for the majority of contemporary “journalism.”

That’s the wonderful new system that is replacing the old system, where Editors and Reporters “write the first draft of history” and “comfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable” and write themselves into the US Constitution as the “Fourth Estate,” a kind of Knights Templar of the First Amendment and the People’s Right To Know.  Yes, it was a fine system that occasionally managed to make the whole thing seem worthwhile.

Of course, you wonder where that system is now.  Where is HL Mencken?  Why doesn’t anyone have the nerve to call shenanigans?  If he were alive today, left, right and center would be called to account.  But, HL Mencken has long since gone on to find out if his rhetoric offended his Maker.  What is left for the living?  The blogosphere.