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You can’t swing a bought-out journalist these days without hitting a screed of free-floating rage directed at Twitter. I suppose it’s understandable: the newspaper business these days makes real estate speculation look positively stable by comparison, and there are a lot of career writers looking down the barrel of a future in which very few people may get paid a livable wage to write. These folks need someone to blame, and their apprehension is understandable, if ultimately not supportable.

But it’s a little less understandable when those screeds come from other netizens. It’s easy enough to find blog and LiveJournal posts about the vanity of Twitter, but a damn sight harder to find a blogger or LJer who recognizes that people were saying the same damn thing about their venues not a few years ago. I suppose there’s no one so vicious as a dreg with some scrap of seniority.

Which brings me to Heidi MacDonald and the non-scandal surrounding a few Twitterers employed at Marvel Comics. (Or Marvel Entertainment or Marvel Respectable or Marvel We Are Big Boys or whatever they’re calling themselves now.) The boys at Marvel were acting a little unprofessional and some net etiquette was breached, but as even Heidi notes, this was a bit of a non-story. Nominal comics “professionals” acting like children is a dog-bites-man scenario if ever there was one.

Have no fear. Heidi uses this flimsy pretext to hobble together a series of thoughts and quotes to prove—I don’t know, that society is crumbling all around us because people use Twitter or something. Setting aside the black-hole-intensity irony of someone defending “old media” from the vapidity of that newfangled e-thing called Twitter on their blog for a moment, I’ll be responding to her post point by point. This may seem a disjointed way to respond, but then, the original post was rather disjointed itself.

First, Heidi takes a lazy swipe at the use of the term “branding.”

And what’s a “brand” anyway? Is it the same thing as, gasp, content?

This is Heidi, who has made sure “The Beat,” her name, and a photo of her in glam sunglasses remain closely oriented for years across multiple venues, pretending not to know what branding is.

Heidi’s first assertion of opinion-as-conventional-wisdom is this little gem:

The Twitter fad is notable in that everyone PREDICTS it’s a fad and not a new means of communication, even while they’re trying to make use of this new means of communication.

Everyone, Heidi? I’d like some citations for that.

What really worries us is that so much on the web is far less lasting than that moldy, uninteractive print.

Heidi has apparently never heard of Google Cache or the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or any of dozens of similar sites. Still, you have to admire her chutzpah for suggesting that print items are far easier to index and search than online data. That must be why there are so many grants and programs for libraries to digitally archive their books for public use.

As evidence for the transience of digital media, Heidi cites the closing of GeoCities:

In its own way the closing of GeoCities is a massive loss of information. If you want to see the Web as it existed ten years ago just find any webpage hosted on GeoCities.

Yes, in this general sneer at the inane chatter of “new media,” Heidi speaks in passionate defense of GeoCities, that understated community of quick wit and tasteful aesthetics. But wait, there’s more.

And yet, these were mostly pages written by people who were driven by passion. They were also trailblazers of web info, scanning and writing and posting information that has since been disseminated in Wikipedia and the other pro sites that come up whenever you Google anything. They were the frigging pioneers!

This is all a bit over-the-top and uninformed (the whole appeal of Wikipedia is that it’s not a “pro” site, Heidi; if you knew anything about Wikipedia you’d know it was meant to be a companion site to a similar outfit staffed by professionals, and that latter project fell through while Wikipedia blossomed… oh, just go read Here Comes Everybody), and yet it sounds strangely familiar. Why is that?

Oh right. It’s similar to the defense I mounted for blogs when Heidi was railing against those almost five years ago, using much the same dismissive language. (To be fair, my old post is equally over-the-top.)

It should be noted that when Heidi was saying all comic blogs were only so much pointless hooting, she herself was experimenting with the format. And all this aimless Twitter-hate has not stopped her from using her own Twitter account regularly. Hey—I wonder if she had a GeoCities site back in the day?

For perspective, Harry McCracken does a “Where are they now” for the top 15 websites and brands of April, 1999 and it’s not pretty.

Did you know that stuff changes? Wild.

Unfortunately, the democratization of media access - where everyone’s opinion is available all the time-

Stock Anti-Web 2.0 Crank Opinion #5A.

—is making us less informed than ever, in favor of a “commentary” based “news” model.

I, too, miss the sober, measured days of Hearst and Pulitzer.

Seriously, anyone who talks romantically about the good old days of objective journalism has no idea what the hell they’re talking about. Compared to their forebears, today’s journalists are as detached and objective as CCTV.

Just today the NY Times reports that CNN’s “middle of the road” news format has lost ratings ground to the strident voices on the right and left at Fox and MSNBC

Not sure what this has to do with Twitter. Maybe this is just a general “kids these days” rant, because Heidi fancies herself a real journalist. Which is strange, as it seems she mostly writes a gossip column about Clive Owen and hotel amenities. How will we know she’s a big shot if she doesn’t keep telling us?!

Heidi shifts focus to the world of entertainment media, whose legitimacy in my eyes rates somewhere between Ann Coulter and the “I was just minding my own business, and then” guy they always interview on local TV news. This quote she digs up as proof of… something… is a powerhouse.

“For one thing, you have bloggers who need traffic and are desperate for attention,” said Mr. Bart. “The overriding truth of the blogging community is they’re trying to figure out how to monetize their endeavors. So you have to call attention to yourself. On that side, you have a clear motive.”

It’s as if they operate on a model where they must compete for attention in hopes of generating revenue. Can you imagine such a thing?

We’re no fan of the level of “reporting” done at the Hollywood trades, but the loss of the authoritative source is getting to be a problem.

Whenever anyone uses a phrase like “authoritative source” in a piece like this, they’re referring to themselves.

Another quote Heidi pulls out:

In separate interviews this week in their adjoining West Wing offices, press secretary Robert Gibbs and Deputy Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer talked at length about the multiplicity of sources - newspapers, network and cable television, radio, blogs - that comprise a news cycle that churns virtually around the clock. “There are so many outlets and so many places that are driving the news that, in the end, nothing gets driven,” Mr. Gibbs said.

This is a press secretary who is complaining that it’s getting harder and harder to control the story. (The assertion that “nothing gets driven” is nonsense—it is stupid-easy to see what stories trend from week to week in both print and digital media.) I find it a little disquieting that Heidi, who wants so badly to be considered a Real Journalist, sympathizes with him.

“Nothing gets driven.” That describes our working day perfectly. By the time we’ve spent an hour reading Twitter to see what we should be writing about, we have no time left to write, because there’s another hour’s worth of Twitter to read.

To bring this full circle, with all due respect to Joe Q, BMB and Tom B., Twitter is all anybody’s got any more and they are really lucky that that’s what passes as news these days. It’s better to be Twittered about than not Twittered about at all. I doubt we’ll ever return to the days of a well-funded, undistracted press. In the meantime, we’ll all keep getting our news from the Underpants Gnomes.

There’s no gentle way to put it: This is very stupid, and a piss-poor excuse for being a lazy writer.

Look, it’s real simple. Twitter is just another thing. It can be anything you want: a way to chat with friends, a way to keep up with breaking news, or even (if used very, very carefully) a good marketing wing for whatever it is you’re trying to do. Or it can be all of these things. (Mine’s a mix of all three.)

It can even be an effective way to promote your publication’s stories and encourage interaction between writers and their audience, which is what just about every major newspaper in the land is now doing. Oh sure, the shift to online content is hurting traditional media’s bottom lines, but to pretend that’s the only thing at work here is either willfully stupid or just plain ignorant.

So which one is this?

I’ve actually worked in radio. In fact, I worked for the largest radio company in the land. That’s right—ClearChannel signed my checks. More importantly, my best friend has been in radio for over a decade, and has seen the transition in how stations are managed as conglomerates snap them up.

It’s a vast, complicated story, but here’s the gist: massive deregulation allowed companies to own more properties in the same market than ever before. This consolidation made a farce out of competition, and corporate entities with no actual interest in the content of radio (or TV, or newspapers) blended and pared their staffs down to the barest bones possible, shedding anyone deemed “unnecessary” in favor of cutting costs and increasing profits. You see this in action every time a wire story occupies prime real estate on the front page or a syndicated radio show out of some other time zone is filling up the morning drive-time slot.

But here’s the thing: bleaching flavor and personality out of your product, changing format and style about once a year—well, you get to juice the ad rates a little every time you do, but you also destroy the identity of your property and shed readers/listeners/viewers. We’re seeing the consequences of this in the aforementioned ClearChannel, who’ve just gone through the second (of what will be at least three) major purges. As in most things, bloat and incompetence are the culprits.

The death of “old media” isn’t so much a murder as it is an assisted suicide. If Heidi MacDonald were interested in doing anything but shaking her fist at “you damn kids,” she would know that.