Sorry Dan, You're Off-Base

This is very inside media baseball but does anyone besides me wonder why this kind of stuff is news?

From Romenesko, a widely-read media columnist at the Poynter Institute comes word of this interview published in the Sacramento Bee with NPR's Daniel Schorr:

"I'm glad I'm not 20 years younger," says NPR's Schorr
Sacramento Bee
"In my day, as a newspaper man, radio man and television man, I had the feeling I was telling people something they wouldn't otherwise know," says 91-year-old Daniel Schorr. "That's no longer true. I'm glad I'm not 20 years younger, because I'd be very discouraged. ...At my age, I look at [the media landscape] and say, 'Boy, I'm glad that's for other people.' I couldn't stand what's going on today."
Posted at 9:09:51 AM

Now I don't have any quibble with Daniel Schorr's ability to express his opinions; he's had a wonderful career of doing so extending beyond broadcast and print, but this is exactly the type of "when I was your age I walked 20 miles barefoot to school -- uphills both ways!" stuff that drives anybody younger than the speaker crazy.

Now I'm not going to speak for Schorr but I can imagine that when he was in his 20s, during the heyday of network radio and the rise of Edward R. Murrow and broadcast journalism's real birth during World War II, there were many grizzled newspaper veterans who scoffed at the media landscape then and noted how glad that funky thing in the box with wires was "for other people."

Hey, we're those other people!

Journalism's still important and the fact the "media" is accessed by more people, at more times, in more places than ever before in history is exciting. We're seeing the demise of the top-down editor driven brand of The Front Page make way for democracy in the truest sense of the word: voters and non-voters alike search for and find the stories they are interested in, and communicate with each other using social networks and other means the architects of big-media business models could hardly imagine a decade ago.

Musical link: this is like Frank Sinatra in the 40s (just look at those girls!); Elvis in the 50s(those hips are the sign of the devil!); The Beatles in the 60s(that hair!); The Bee Gees in the 70s (disco? You're kidding, right?); The Clash (those damn kids again); Run DMC (hip-hop?) and every other style trendsetter that set teeth chattering in any head with a touch of gray.

Get over it. It's the natural progression; how about less whining about how horrible things are now compared to the way things were and more faith in the generation next in line?