Just When You Think Online Journalism Is Rubbish, This Comes Along

Stephen Hume is one of Canada's finest essayists. He's also one of Canada's least-appreciated journalists. We were at the Vancouver Sun together, and there he still toils, and here is the result of an odyssey, years in the making, now on-line, about 120,000 words in total, interactive, gorgeous, splendid history, and also great literary journalism in the bargain. If this is the future of journalism, I'm liking it.

Stephen tells me Sun editor Patricia Graham deserves kudos for her unwavering support for this project. So congratulations to Patricia as well, along with condolences, to her and to all my former colleagues there, for the recent unpleasantness.

The combined newsprint circulation of both The Sun and the Province is now roughly where it was 50 years ago, but the troubles are by no means confined to Vancouver. It's happening everywhere. Here's a fine survey and analysis of the phenomenon in the American Journalism Review.

Canada has its own special problems, which my pal Marc Edge has written about extensively. There's a four-part series on that matter, excerpted from Marc's book Asper Nation, which begins today in The Tyee.

Neither the current euphoria over "citizen journalism" or the prospects for "media democracy activism" do much to put a spring in my step, I regret to say (although where there's no free press, as in Burma or Iran, citizen journalism is proving more than adequate to the task of dissent).

New media is making things easier for avocational and amateur journalists, some of whom are proving much better and braver writers than the "professionals." This is good. But journalism is a trade, like any other. It requires some training, a proper apprenticeship, and a hard slog of hands-on experience to produce journeyman work you can reasonably count on to conform with expected standards and practices. It's like any other trade in that way. Do you want those stairs built by some bloke with a hammer, or an experienced union carpenter?

But at least for now we have tradesmen like Stephen Hume around to tide us over into whatever new forms journalism will take once the current weirdness shakes itself out.

Nice work, Stephen.