The NY Times’s Bill Keller says he’s not clairvoyant; hopefully, he’s prescient
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, starts his letter to the New York Review of Books, which has published an article by Michael Massing exploring the new news landscape, celebrating his newspaper’s own Web-based credentials. “For one thing, my responsibilities at the Times include overseeing one of the most inventive and popular news Web sites in existence, which includes among its abundant offerings more than sixty blogs,” he writes. Keller concludes by owning up to his own Web-based worries, “about whether ‘citizen journalists’ are a substitute for professional journalists … that the polarization and glorification of polemic on the Web makes it easier for readers to feel informed without ever encountering information that contradicts their prejudices or obliges them to think for themselves.” The upshot, for Keller? “I suspect the journalistic landscape five or ten years from now will be a mix of survivors and start-ups, and that the distinction between mainstream and new media will diminish from both directions,” writes Keller. “I think traditional news organizations — including the Times but also many others — will continue to evolve.”