The New New Journalism

This is not the sort of copy that you’d ever see in a professional print publication:

FUCK YOU APPLE INVESTORS WHO HAVE WRITTEN ME HATE MAIL. If you don’t have the balls to hold the stock through some rumors you think are false, IGNORE THE RUMORS OR SELL THE STOCK!

FUCK YOU OTHER JOURNALISTS WHO WROTE ME HATE MAIL. Almost all of you who didn’t like our sourcing are doing some really nasty backpedaling, and consulting the talking head witch doctors and analysts looking for data. There is no data there, you jerkoffs!

THESE STORIES ARE NOT ABOUT TRAFFIC! WE DON’T EVEN GET TRAFFIC BONUSES ANYMORE! Sure this post is tacky, I don’t care. At this very moment, I am very self aware that I’m being a tacky, angry, crazy person. I just can’t listen to another person miss the point of why it’s shitty to cover Steve’s health like we, the press, have.

Everything that’s both bad and good about online journalism is all mixed up right there.

In the old days, something so embarrassingly personal and scattered would never have appeared in a publication that anyone took seriously. It’s a sign of unprofessionalism, lack of editing, lack of polish.

But that’s not always bad. Sometimes the polish and the editing represent integrity, accuracy, and excellency. And sometimes they represent elitism and a walled garden.

Even if a widely respected professional print journalist wanted to write something like this, it would never make it past the editors. In online, hastily-written, spontaneous confessionals that get published are not only possible, but sometimes desirable.

Does writing this article make Brian Lam a worse journalist? Or a better one?

Read the whole piece on Gizmodo.