You can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's not the journalists; it's the critics that I can't understand. I've never understood what kind of a person would want to criticize someone else's work.
A common criticism of establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and uncritically repeat what government officials say.
Critics should be looked at simply as commentators.
Since the advent of the Internet - more recently compounded by blogging - everyone can be a published voice. Any cowardly, anonymous anger-monger can have an audience of thousands. That doesn't make them a journalist any more than my throwing an onion and a few carrots into a pot of boiling water makes me Julia Child.
While journalists cannot right every wrong, champion every cause or fix every problem, they can - through the written word - lift someone's burden for a day, make some elderly woman on a bus smile or let them know they are noticed by someone.
At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.
At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
Journalists don't have audiences - they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.