Contrasting the Perpendicular with the Backwards

David Warsh at Economic Principals has a very complementary piece this week about Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View:

Economist’s View is a lightly-edited aggregation of items from around the Web – newspaper columns and blog posts mostly, plus the occasional podcast or video, continually updated throughout the day and augmented periodically by Thoma’s own commentary, all the package distinguished by a selecting principle that is lively, informed, inclusive and nearly straight up-and-down. In this respect, Thoma’s site resembles Romenesko on the news industry, Johnson’s Russia List, or Real Clear Politics on the US scene (minus the slowly-increasing volume of Real Clear Politics-produced filler). Thoma monitors nearly 300 feeds, culls them, links thirty items or so, and himself writes as many as a dozen annotated entries a day. The easy-to-use site is an alternative to the sort of RSS feed-reader you might laboriously build yourself. Though the demarcation criteria are not quite so clear as on those other sites – the topic is vast, after all – I find Thoma pretty close to one-stop shopping for the sort of economic news and analysis that interests me qua news – a digital fire-hose, to be sure, but a manageable one. Looking at Thoma once a day is enough.

There’s more in the piece about blogging in general, specifically where Thoma and a couple of others like him (mentioned above) fit into the broader blogosphere:

The proprietors of each are essentially editors. They hue as best they understand it to the perpendicular. They seek to see whole the debate they cover, to present its raw files fairly to readers, to occupy the center ground and treat all comers fairly. They function more like referees on a stylized battlefield than (as Robert Wright distinguishes among bloggers) disc jockeys or musicians. It is no accident that in each of these cases the blogger’s ego is almost totally subordinated to the task, that the proprietors work long hours for little or nothing.

It’s in stark contrast to a column I read yesterday by Connie Schultz at The Plain Dealer (via Jeff Jarvis). She argues that tightening copyright law is the way to save newspapers. Fine for her and her organization, but it would be at the expense of everything newspapers supposedly stand for: open discussion, transparency and objectivity, public accountability, keeping the powerful in-check, shining a light on corruption, giving a voice to the weak and oppressed — all things that a more free and open web would naturally promote, but would be undermined by the atmosphere that would be created by efforts to tighten copyright laws.

I actually spent a long time working on a really negative piece, critical of Schultz’s plan, and more generally, the deeply contradictory attitude being exhibited by some journalists. I was glad when David Warsh and Mark Thoma gave me a positive alternative.

As an aside, I’ve been using Economist’s View as one of many models for my own blogging practices, but now that I think more about it, you might begin to see even more similarities here at Open Conceptual.

More From the Archives:

• 12-18-2008 -- From News to Nascence
• 12-17-2008 -- Newspapers, Getting Old
• 10-16-2009 -- Memo to Professional Media: “Stop Resisting!”
• 03-24-2009 -- London’s Social Media Momentum
• 03-13-2009 -- Concept of the Week: Pareto Improvements