You may recall my speaking of the hilarious NYC Blogger Summit I attended back in February (detailed here and here). One of the ringmasters that night was Sree Sreenivasan, dean of students and professor at Columbia Journalism School, who was shockingly uninformed about this thing called the Intertubes. And yet he is someone who is constantly called up to pontificate on “new media.” Jane at Firedoglake points out a Chicago Sun-Times article that couldn’t be more clueless about blogs, bloggers, and blogging. The money quote is from Sreenivasan:
Sree Sreenivasan, new media professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, says the effectiveness of Web sites and blogs as political tools may only go so far: "It's still a small percentage of people using these technologies."Most are young and what Sreenivasan terms "early adaptors." And, as he concludes, the impact of young voters "is notoriously hard to predict." It was thought they were going to turn out in big numbers in 2004 but that didn't happen.
As Jane so respectfully counters, the 2006 Blogads reader survey found:
The median political blog reader is a 43 year old man with an annual family income of $80,000. He reads 6 blogs a day for 10 hours a week. 39% have post-graduate degrees. 70% have contributed to a campaign.
Factchecking: it’s so Woodward-and-Bernstein, so 1973. Though with nitwits like Sree Sreenivasan teaching them, it’s no wonder reporters like the Sun-Times’ Jennifer Hunter don’t know what journalism is.
Also, Sreenivasan’s Web site looks like something out of 1998.
(Technorati tags: blogging, Sree Sreenivasan)
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