Rashard Mendenhall Offers Contrast to the Apathetic Black Athlete

Rashard Mendenhall Offers Contrast to the Apathetic Black Athlete

by Mark Anthony Neal | The Atlanta Post

Like many Americans, professional football player Rashard Mendenhall was moved by the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US military personnel.  Yet what moved Mendenhall to speak out in the hours after the announcement was his disgust with the celebratory antics of folk who gathered across from the White House and at Ground Zero in New York City.   On his Twitter feed Mendenhall wrote “What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side…”  Mendenhall, who plays for the Pittsburgh Steelers, also expressed some concern that many who were celebrating in the streets didn’t really know the full story.

Reaction to Mendenhall’s comments was swift, most notably by Steelers team president Art Rooney II, who quickly distanced the team from Mendenhall’s comments. “The entire Steelers organization is very proud of the job our military personnel have done and we can only hope this leads to our troops coming home soon,” he announced. And just recently, Mendenhall was dropped as a spokesman for the sports apparel company Champion.

On Sports talk radio—never a bastion of thoughtful commentary—the reactions were to be expected: athletes should keep their opinions about anything other than the game, to themselves.  As Thabiti Lewis observes in his book Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America, sports are intended to “divert us from conversations of political, economic, or social criticisms and analysis, while cultivating jingoists—intense patriots.” Yet, underlying even those nominal responses is the belief that Black athletes, in particular, should shut-up and, to quote rapper and activist Jasiri X, “just run the ball boy.”

Read the Full Essay @ The Atlanta Post

Shut up and Play, or Just Shut Up: Lessons from the Panic over Rashard Mendenhall's Tweets

 

Shut up and Play, or Just Shut up:

Lessons from the Panic over Rashard Mendenhall's Tweets

by David J. Leonard and C. Richard King | Special to NewBlackMan

It has become almost cliché to condemn and demonize contemporary black athletes for their purported lack of political activity.  Celebrating the courageous stances of athletes like Muhammad Ali, John Carlos, and Curt Flood, it is commonplace to see contemporary praise alongside of the demonization of today’s ballers.  Here are but a few examples of the ways in which the modern athlete, defined and represented through the black athlete, are ridicule for political cowardice and apathy. 

Jaymes Powell Jr., in “Severed from the Struggle,” argues that, “many athletes of African-American descent haven’t embraced activism the way previous generations did.  They say there are no modern-day counterparts to Jim Brown, Tommy [sic] Smith, Arthur Ashe, and former N.C. A & T quarterback Jesse Jackson, athletes who took leading roles in the battle for civil rights” (2007).  Similarly, Greg Mathis in “Where is Today’s Muhammad Ali?” concludes that sports no longer generates activism, “fall[ing] victim to the slave mentality of ‘take the money and shut up.”  He notes further, “From athletic shoes to sports drinks today’s major athletes can and do hawk everything under the sun. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to political and social issues, these celebrities are uncharacteristically silent.  It was not always that way” (2004).   Greg Jayne agrees, arguing that today’s athletes, unlike Smith and Carlos, Curt Flood, or Ali, have turned their backs on the tradition of athletes taking a stand.  “They’re wealthy, they’re prominent and they’re alternatively revered and reviled for their uneasy position as role models.  Athletes are among the most visible members of society.  Yet along with the riches and the fame and the status as style-makers, there is a wealth of silence” (2003).  Scoop Jackson in an effort to highlight the efforts Etan Thomas to speak truth to power, put it this way:

We live in the era of the soundless athlete. An era in which the highest-profile figures in sports not only say nothing about the condition of the sociopolitical landscape their fan base resides in, but worse -- they have nothing to say. They'll speak of love and hate in Nike commercials, they'll save women falling from buildings in Adidas spots. They'll dunk cantaloupes in carts in grocery store isles, they'll chase Afro'd dolls through parties trying to get a Sprite. They'll put tats on their bodies proclaiming love for loved ones and those they've lost; they'll go on “Oprah” or “Jay Leno” and shed tears about their past and how they were lost; they'll do one-on-ones with chosen sportscasters to promote their CDs; they'll form opinions about dress codes. Saying nothing.

And, bottom line? Ain't none of them wrong. That's what they are supposed to do. Their silence has emancipated them. Taken them places past their American dreams. Made them our heroes. Some our leaders. To them we look for answers; answers we find in their silence. We applaud their performances, make sure our kids always choose them on "NBA Ballers”; Live '06 them, Xbox them, DS them, PSP them. All the while accepting their silence (2006).

While many commentators see the silence as organic, as a reflection of the dysfunction of today’s (black) athletes, as their refusal to accept the baton of their forbearers, and even the changing economics of sports, they, like so much in the media, ignore the mechanism that discipline and punish (black) athletes for speaking up, for challenging the status quo.  As Scoop Jackson notes, “And, bottom line? Ain't none of them wrong. That's what they are supposed to do.”  Better said, it is what is required of them: “Shut up and play”! 

To grasp the power of this equation, we need look no further than the current frenzy and the denunciation surrounding Pittsburgh Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall, who in the wake of the announced killing of Osama Bin Laden and national celebrations, took to his twitter page, where he offered the following:

What kind of person celebrates death? It's amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We've only heard one side...

@dkeller23 We'll never know what really happened. I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style [USA Today reports that this has been subsequently removed]

I believe in God. I believe we're ALL his children. And I believe HE is the ONE and ONLY judge.

Those who judge others, will also be judged themselves.

For those of you who said you want to see Bin Laden burn in hell and piss on his ashes, I ask how would God feel about your heart?

There is not an ignorant bone in my body. I just encourage you to #think

Not surprisingly his remarks have triggered an avalanche of criticism.  Art Rooney II, the Steelers’ owner, publicly condemned his comments, seemingly questioning his patriotism, going as far to link his comments to support for the troops.  "I have not spoken with Rashard so it is hard to explain or even comprehend what he meant with his recent Twitter comments. The entire Steelers' organization is very proud of the job our military personnel have done and we can only hope this leads to our troops coming home soon."  Others followed suit focusing on the one conspiracy tweet to depict him as a crazy, ignorant, and otherwise out-of-step with reality.  Described as a “meltdown,” “Football's Newest Villain,” as someone whose “mouth and tweets are simply disrespectful,” as someone who “sounds ridiculous (again),” as irrational and not presently on earth, as sympathetic to Bin Laden,  as a defender of Bin Laden and another “dumb jock.”  Much of the discourse focused on his questions that fit with those conspiracy theorists and not on many other tweets about the meaning of and celebration of the assassination.

Rick Chandler seemed to capture the sentiment and animosity best with his column:

Last night I had a very vivid dream. An elite team of Navy SEALs flew two Blackhawk helicopters into Rashard Mendenhall’s residence. After encountering token resistance from the dog (neutralized by Snausages), the elite special forces team located the Steelers running back in an upstairs bedroom, where he was in the process of tweeting a friend (not a euphemism). The SEALs confiscated his cell phone — and all others in the house — and then departed as quickly as they had arrived.  So, hopefully, there will be no further retarded tweets such as this.

On Foxnews.com, comments consistently questioned his intelligence, calling him a “moron,” an “idiot,” “a clown” and “garbage” who couldn’t have gone to college.  One poster made clear the power of white racial framing, noting, “Gee, and I thought the NFL only harbored rapists, murderers, and dog killers.”   Many who posted on the site called for his release and/or a boycott of the Steelers.  Similarly, on ESPN.com (and on Huffington Post there was more support for Mendenhall especially regarding the condemnation of celebrations of death) which as of Tuesday had elicited over 8,000 comments, he was referred as a “moron,” a “terrorist,” “an idiot,” and someone who just needs “to shut up.”

Several commentators also linked his tweets to his past comments about the NFL and slavery.  Responding to comments made by the Vikings’ Adrian Peterson, Mendenhall stated, “Anyone with knowledge of the slave trade and the NFL could say that these two parallel each other."  In posts and in comments, his remarks about 9/11 and the killing of Bin Laden are connected to his comments about the NFL not only in an effort to demonize him as a radical but to reduce him to yet another ungrateful black athlete who spits on his profession and country.  Columnist Gene Collier epitomizes this rendering of Mendenhall as he openly mocked him and his intelligence in a recent diatribe, lambasting the running back for his lack of understanding of sport management, structural engineering, and history.

Last I checked, no one was dodging the NFL draft by fleeing to Canada. No one is forced to play football, Rashard. This must have played well in Dublin, where the United States ambassador to Ireland is only the man after which the Rooney Rule is named, only the first-born son of The Chief, one of the first NFL owners to have African-Americans on his roster.

In short, Collier and seemingly countless others find Mendenhall to be ignorant and ungrateful, laughable for his lack of common sense and easily dismissed for not knowing his place. As Collier quipped, "It's better to remain silent and thought a fool than to tweet and remove all doubt."  In other words, shut up and play; don’t trouble us with your thoughts, especially when they run counter to conventional wisdom, challenge the white racial frame, and upset management and the fan base.  As Collier concludes, refiguring the star athlete as a terrorist, “As an American, Mendenhall has rights. Because it's a great and confounding country, he has a right to his mouth just as he has a right to an AK-47. How 'bout don't go shootin' 'em off.”

Mendenhall is not alone in feeling the public wrath’s for not only being politically vocal but for speaking out in away that challenges dominant assumptions and ideologies.  Carlos Delgado, Toni Smith, Josh Howard, Steve Nash, and Etan Thomas (see Dave Zirin for more discussion), among others, have also been targeted for their outspoken challenges to imperialism, war, and systemic violence.  It is not a politically active athlete that is undesirable, but one who challenges the conventional wisdom, especially when said athlete is a young African American.  

Dave Zirin, in “Shut Up and Play? Patriotism, Jock Culture and the Limits of Free Speech,” reminds readers about the historic blindness in today’s celebration of activist-athlete of year’s past: If you look historically at athletes who today are admired for their courageous honesty—people like Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Jim Brown, and Bill Russell—they were all told by the sports columnists of their day that they should button their lips and just play.”

This conclusion raises a troubling question: What exactly does the nostalgia for political athletes of the past mean today? Sadly, it may mean that those selected for celebration fall on the right side of history, presumably with “us.”  Their once objectionable observations now resonate with common sense assessments of race, justice, and society. In celebrating them exclusively, while remain silent about, or worse attacking, objectionable expressions by athletes today, encourages both a confirmation of the status quo and a demonization of those few who do speak up.  More broadly, the panic around Mendenhall’s tweets further underscores the deep entanglements of sporting spectacles and national narratives. 

Few complaints were heard when the NFL (to take but one example) amplified its inculcation of patriotism following 9/11.  In fact, franchises profited; fans felt good; and the war on terror thrived unquestioned. In contrast, the passing comments of one player questioning how the public responded to the killing of Osama bin Laden and accepted accounts of the events he set in motion sparks a firestorm of controversy.  In such a context, one cannot hope for sport to liberate, inspire, or transform.  Indeed, the Mendenhall affair may confirm Noam Chomsky’s observation about sport: “it occupies the populations, and it keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter” (2002, 99-100).  By extension, nostalgic celebrations paired with contemporary demonization further turns our attention away from what matters in sport and society.

***

C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.

David J. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman. His next book (SUNY Press) is on the NBA after the November 2004 brawl during a Pacers-Pistons game at the The Palace of Auburn Hills He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.

A History of Black Folk on Twitter: Mark Anthony Neal @ TEDxDuke

From 'Go Down Moses' to the death of Manning Marable, what is the relationship between Black folk and social media?

About TEDx

TEDx was created in the spirit of TED's mission, "ideas worth spreading." The program is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

At TEDx events, a screening of TEDTalks videos -- or a combination of live presenters and TEDTalks videos -- sparks deep conversation and connections. TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated independently, on a community-by-community basis.

'Left of Black': Episode #20 featuring Bakari Kitwana and Kyra Gaunt

Left of Black #20
w/Bakari Kitwana & Kyra Gaunt
February 7, 2011

In this 20th installment of Left of Black, host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by author, political analyst and activist Bakari Kitwana in a conversation about the current media landscape. Neal also talks with Baruch College Professor and 2009 TED Fellow Kyra D. Gaunt whose recent essay Black Twitter, Combating the New Jim Crow & the Power of Social Networking examines the social justice potential of Social Media.

→Bakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst. He’s currently senior editor of newsone.com, the internet news presence of Radio One. He’s also the CEO of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop, which conducts town hall meetings around the country on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop generation. Kitwana is the author of The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture (2002) and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabees and the New Reality of Race in America (2005).

→Kyra D. Gaunt is a trained ethnomusicologist and classical singer who teaches the study of African American music, cultural anthropology, hip-hop, race and gender studies. A 2009 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Fellow, Gaunt is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College. She is the author of The Games Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (NYU Press, 2007)

***

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public

It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public
by Dave Parry

Last night Gladwell published this short piece for the New Yorker. Gladwell revisits his earlier essay which argued that the ties produced by social media (weak ties) are not as important as social ties produced by face to face iteration (strong ties), and thus social media is not a particularly advantageous platform for fermenting social change. While I disagree with much of that essay, it seems worth investigating/considering, the degree to which social ties produced by social media are substantially different from those which develop from relationships not mediated thru social media. Bizarrely though, his most recent post actually suggests something quite different. Rather than argue that social media has effects on social organization (replacing strong ties with weak ones), Gladwell argues that social media is of little to no-consequence:

“But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

The point for Gladwell is that asking how the revolution happens is the “least interesting” question one can ask. Again bizarrely this seems to contradict his earlier piece which argued that “how” a revolution happened was of crucial importance for understanding the nature of the ties people develop. It would seem that the only consistency between these pieces is an attempt to downplay the significance social media plays in social movements, indeed arguing that it either doesn’t help, or is of no relevance. The first Gladwell is worth considering, the second less so.

But where Gladwell misses in this second article is realizing that the discourse has shifted, moved beyond does social media cause a revolution, to how does the existence of social media change the warp and the woof of a social movement. This question is far more interesting, and far more important. The “Twitter Caused the Revolution” headlines have been more or less replaced by more nuanced accounts of “what role did social media play in these protests.” Few have been willing to argue that social media is not part of the equation here, or that social media’s role is not worth investigating. This strikes me as a fairly substantial shift from the “Iran = Twitter Revolution” headlines of a year and a half ago. Indeed, I have even detected a subtle shift from the Tunisia analysis, whereby understanding of social media’s role has become more nuanced and refined. I have spent the better part of two days now reading thoughts and blog posts from various places around the web attempting to learn what others have to say about these events and I see little evidence from academics and leading thinkers in the field that Twitter = democracy arguments are still alive. (Even CNET argued that there is no such thing as a social

To be sure “cyber-utopism” as a discourse is still a dangerous and prevalent myth. Indeed all one has to to is see recent comments by Iranian activist and noble prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who said, “So, I can tell you that thanks to technology dictators can’t get a good nights sleep,” to realize that the belief that social media = social justice is alive and well. Clinton’s 21st century statecraft ideology is alive and well.

I think it is also important to distinguish here between the analysis of social media and the Egypt uprising, I and you, are likely reading, and the one that still circulates amongst people who are not particularly and specifically invested in the matter. That is I think if you asked people who do not spend hours a day on Twitter, or reading articles on the web written by experts on the subject, the impression might be distinctly different. I have had numerous conversations (four in the airport alone on Sunday) with people who all articulated the belief that social media was largely responsible for the uprising, and that do to social media we are likely to see all of Africa revolt, and demand democracy, a cascade effect produced by the internet. Which is to say, that although the debate has for the large part moved past cyber-utopism, the effects of that debate still linger. And in this respect it is not the internet that matters so much as how we talk about the internet (see Thesis One of Morozov’s book).

But that doesn’t account for the most recent article by Gladwell, indeed it makes said article even more academically irresponsible by recasting and repeating a debate that most (all) experts have moved past. Gladwell misses an opportunity to help develop questions about the role of social media in pursuit of social justice, instead choosing to play the “nothing new here, move along” card. One doesn’t correct for the cyber-utopic discourse that still exists by utterly dismissing the effects of the medium under discussion. This just creates the “yes it is,” “no it isn’t” debate which has proved not only inadequate, but at least partly responsible for the less than effective social media foreign policy. We need better.

Read the Full Essay @ Profound Heterogeneity

50 Cent's Twitter feed: Brilliant marketing or irresponsible behavior

We want to meet the real Curtis behind the $500 million empire.

50 Cent's Twitter Feed:
Brilliant Marketing or Irresponsible Behavior?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) has a Twitter account. Given the rather mundane content of most of his recent recordings, no one should really care. But more than 3 million people do care enough to follow 50 Cent and the travails of his rumored love bunny Chelsea Handler. He rarely has anything of substance to say—which is not to say that some of his observations aren’t funny. It is perhaps marketing genius that the rapper-mogul has become a Twitter celebrity—separate and distinct from his real life celebrity.

50 Cent’s use of Twitter is the perfect example of the ways that mainstream celebrities, particularly rappers, have sought to distinguish between their branded selves and their individual selves. For example, as Snoop Dogg continues to sell music, it was Calvin Broadus the doting, Cliff Huxtable-like father who was the star of the E!’s Fatherhood.

While California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger rarely has to distance himself from his Terminator character, rappers are almost never given the opportunity distance themselves from their rap personas. There are also quite a few rappers who invest in those personas 24-7, because they are so lucrative.

As such, I’m grown enough to know that that the music of 50 Cent, which I largely despise, is not the sum total of the man named Curtis Jackson, who by-the-way, is worth more than $500 million. With the help of figures like Chris Lightly, Jackson has become a savvy businessman and 50 Cent’s presence on Twitter is just an extension of his acute sense of how to effectively market his persona.

Even 50 Cent’s dog—Oprah Winafree—has gotten in on the act, as 50 Cent presumably ghost-tweets the dog’s twitter alias OprahtheDog. Perhaps even Jackson’s team is behind Twitter’s @English50Cent, which translates 50 Cent’s tweets into “standard” English. As a whole there’s a Bakhtin-esque quality to 50 Cent’s tweeter presence, that suggest high satire more than utter ignorance.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

The Curious Obsession with the #BrownTwitterBird

The relationship between blackness and technology

The Curious Obsession with the #BrownTwitterBird
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

Farhad Manjoo’s recent Slate article, How Black People Use Twitter, is yet another example of mainstream culture’s fascination—even obsession—with the ways that Black people have utilized technology. Whether presented as a “digital divide” or the Black use of hashtags on Twitter, the conversation essentially remains the same; What are those Negroes up to now? Perhaps this is as it should be; Black folk are in the unique position of having once been cutting edge technology—the kind of technology that helped drive the United States into advanced capitalism and global domination. Such intimacies have historically manifested themselves in innovative and quirky uses of technology.

Perhaps the most curious thing about Manjoo’s article is the fact that anyone would spend any amount of time studying the advent of a particular hashtag on a given day, let alone the racial component of its origins. Indeed it seems weird that anyone Manjoo stay up late at night monitoring—some might call it surveillance—the twittering activities of Black folk. If white folks were once asking “Booker, what are the drums saying?” (an Adolph Reed classic), they seem to be asking now, “Manjoo, 'what are the tweets saying?'"

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com

What Happens To Blogging When Twitter Goes Down

What Happens To Blogging When Twitter Goes Down

by Alex Wilhelm

Twitter pulled a Twitter today and went down, as you well know, and thus took the blogging world crashing along with it. It is no small secret that in regards to online content dissemination (which is not a dirty word, I promise), Twitter is quickly becoming the de facto solution.

Not that RSS, Facebook, and the like do not share some part in any publication’s overall strategy for the promotion of recent posts, but the most pugnaciously powerful percolator is quickly becoming Twitter, most especially in the technology world. If you already knew this, you are probably in the writing game.

There is an interesting distinction, however, that needs to be drawn between websites that are largely of the blog format, and those that are largely not. Of course, there is an enormous gray area, the HuffingtonPost for example living in it, but the dichotomy is accurate enough here for our larger point. If your publication covers a specific niche, and quickly follows a breaking new cycle, Twitter is the only tool to quickly amass readers to a story that has literally just been born. That and the carrier pigeon, if you must.

The difference, returning to our largely non-blog publication, is that their audience is slightly less episodic, and in terms of the news cycle, constantly behind in the editorial aspect of their work. The websites of newspapers, and to a higher degree their print publications, fit this mold well. Their audience is loyal to a specific brand of news (the WSJ, the NYTimes, and so forth), and do not mind even a 12 hour lag from occurrence to story for their reading. This sort of publication has a stock audience that will read a certain number of articles a week regardless of their content. They are not looking to read something specific; they want to read the ‘news,’ and thus have but a small drive to go and find it themselves.

And so for the publications that are more blog-esque (this is most of the websites you read, I assume), traffic is episodic and occurrence based, and therefore lean heavily on an announcement medium that is single-action oriented, and contains the ability to expand via sharing (the vulgar ‘viral’ expansion), and reach a large enough group of people to make the time gain (between the fast story happening now, and the slower story the next day from the non-blog) to the reader worth the extra effort of going out and reading the story now, as opposed to having it spoon fed to them the next day by the USA Today, or what have you.

Read the Full Article @ TheNextWeb

The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted?

Does this mean the beginning of the end of journalism as we know it? Or the start of a new revolution?

Twitter’s DIY Journalism
by Natalie Hopkinson

I first realized that our democracy had kicked into another gear last September, when in the middle of President Barack Obama’s speech rallying Congress to pass a health care bill, someone in the U.S. Capitol chamber screamed, “YOU LIE!”

Even Obama looked a bit shaken, as I was, sitting in my living room, one eye on CNN, and the other eye on my Twitter feed.

On Twitter, within seconds, someone had produced a name of the heckler. Just as quickly, someone else listed his office phone number and Web site, which quickly crashed. Minutes later, a link was produced to a site raising money for the alleged heckler’s political opponent. Then came the links to old articles of the alleged heckler dissing the black daughter of Sen. Strom Thurmond. By the end of the night, thousands of dollars were raised in a South Carolina congressional race.

At the end of the speech, a CNN anchor announced she believed they could identify the heckler, but they were double-checking to make sure before airing his name.

Watching it all unfold, I felt both hopelessly uninformed and over-informed at the same time. What if it wasn’t actually Rep. Joe Wilson, but someone else, who made the rude break in decorum? And what if Joe Wilson’s Congressional opponent turned out to be a moron of the Blago ilk? What do any of those people donating money on the Net know about the politics of Aiken County, S.C., anyways?

This is a picture of our democracy at work at Twitter speed. Max Fisher at The Atlantic Wire recently did a great roundup of the recent debate over what is the best medium to convey information; a pair of The New Yorker essays scoffing at Twitter had launched the debate. No, Steve Coll, there is no moral judgment to be made about Twitter’s characteristics. And no, George Packer, I am not “uncritically cheerleading Twitter,” leading to my own destruction as a journalist.

In our clumsy forays into Twitter, many of us are desperately trying to find out: Who are the true gatekeepers of information these days? As a friend observed recently, the debate typically boils down to: Old Guy insisting that journalism has gone to hell versus Young Guy insisting that New Media is going to save us.

I think part of the crisis of confidence in the field of journalism is that neither one gets to decide. Both are just going to have to evolve.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root