| By STAN B. HUSKEY | |
 Fact or fiction? Sometimes it’s hard to determine one from the other. Sometimes the media pushes something so much you begin to believe it. Sometimes folklore is passed along from one generation to the next until what was once just a rumor from days gone is now a story to be believed. You can find stories everywhere these days. Back in the day, your “stories” were the afternoon soaps. When I was growing up, a “story” was a lie. “Don’t go telling stories,” my mom would say. But, kids will be kids, and a little white lie was going to come out every now and then. Unfortunately for me, Mom always knew when I wasn’t telling the truth. Can we be as certain about what we find on the Internet these days?
I get so tired of hearing about the demise of the newspaper, especially since it is usually followed with some inane fact about how the Internet is making us obsolete. This is a preview of a great column by Times Herald Executive Editor, Stan Huskey. Read the rest here. B. |
Monday, February 25, 2008
Telling Stories from ‘Stories’
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8 comments:
Stan, the excellent, trustworthy work that you and your reporters do at the Times Herald will NEVER be obsolete.
Yours is a much-trusted source of news.
Hey Stan --
The word on the street is that readership has gone up ever since you became the Executive Editor of the Times Herald.
I think that's prime evidence that the Internet is not making legitimate newspapers like yours obsolete.
I am careful about what I trust on the Internet.
Naturally, I feel confident in a legitimate site like the Times Herald: http://www.timesherald.com. There, I can check out the AP Headlines, and news items are clearly differentiated from "opinion" items.
The most untrustworthy items on the Internet are blogs run by people who conceal their identities. I never, never, never trust what they have to say.
I feel confident about the veracity of stories I read in a well-run newspaper like the Times Herald.
The reporters at such a newspaper have journalistic integrity, and the editorial staff is careful about the accuracy of the articles.
That's why newspapers like the Times Herald will not become obsolete.
Stan Huskey's full column is an excellent read (Bill Shaw put a hyperlink on his Writemarsh blog to Stan Huskey's column found at http://www.timesherald.com.).
Here's some more good points that Times Herald Executive Editor Stan Huskey makes:
"I can’t tell you the number of e-mails I get from people who blast the newspaper for not covering this story or that story because we’re too liberal (apparently, they don’t know me).
They’ll ask: “Why didn’t you have that story, I saw it online?” Fact of the matter is, it’s usually bunk.
We don’t print just anything in our news pages.
If we can’t flush it out, it gets flushed.
There’s a game we play at the house called Fact or Crap. It’s a lot of fun and the kids get a kick out of playing it, too.
We’re not playing a game, though. Your newspaper, the newspaper you have in your hand right now, is perhaps the last watchdog left in society.
We simply cannot afford to be without it. Left unchecked, facts will be distorted by people pushing their own agenda until you can no longer tell them from fiction."
Are you all seriously kidding me? That column might have made sense if it had been written in 1996. As it stands, it is vapid, self-important nonsense, made especially ridiculous when one reads the line, "your newspaper, the newspaper you have in your hand right now," ON THE INTERNET. Perhaps if Stan was doing more editing and less commenting, he'd have noticed that there's a comma missing in one of the captions on today's front page.
In answer to your Comment, Stan Huskey's column IS in the newspaper. (i.e. in hardcopy form -- which is why he refers to it as "the newspaper you have in your hand right now")
Stan Huskey's column also can be found online at http://www.timesherald.com.
It makes many excellent points. Perhaps you should pick up a copy of the Times Herald and read it before you jump to conclusions. You obviously have not read the full version of the column, which also can be found online at the following location:
http://www.timesherald.com/WebApp/appmanager/JRC/Daily?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pg_article&r21.pgpath=%2FNTH%2FOpinion&r21.content=%2FNTH%2FOpinion%2FHeadlineList_Story_1637696
For everyone's convenience, Bill Shaw also included a hyperlink to the online version of that column at the bottom of the Writemarsh excerpt from that column.
I was wondering what got that person so upset (I'm talking about the person who attacked Stan Huskey's column in his Comment).
I think the following Comment must have hit a nerve:
"The most untrustworthy items on the Internet are blogs run by people who conceal their identities. I never, never, never trust what they have to say."
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