STRONG WORDS FROM A JOURNALISM SCHOOL DEAN

Nicholas Lemann is the new Dean of the Joseph Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University.

He is a controversial figure.

Now has written a long piece in The New Yorker: "Amateur Hour. Journalism without Journalists."

He is politcally incorrect and bloggers and wemedia practitioners are mad with his strong words against them.

"The most fervent believers in the transforming potential of Internet journalism are operating not only on faith in its achievements, even if they lie mainly in the future, but on a certainty that the old media, in selecting what to publish and broadcast, make horrible and, even worse, ignobly motivated mistakes.

They are politically biased, or they are ignoring or suppressing important stories, or they are out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns, or they are merely passive transmitters of official utterances.

The more that traditional journalism appears to be an old-fashioned captive press, the more providential the Internet looks."

When I was at Columbia University in 1978 the Dean was a very boring person, and our School a much more politically correct institution.

Read Lehmann article.

He is a much more interesting Dean than his predecessors.