Jarvis: Forget the curmudgeons

Jeff Jarvis, blogger/professor/new media thinker, reprises his dismissive attitude toward old media "curmudgeons," based on an experience he had at last weekend's Public Radio News Directors Incorporated conference in Washington. Jarvis and Terry Heaton gave a mostly well-received presentation on blogging and journalism at the meeting, but there was at least one loudly contentious pubradio newsman in attendance. Jarvis says: "I have decided I’m not going to waste my time anymore with lazy, rude, self-important, self-delusional, intellectually dishonest, closed-minded curmudgeons who bark against the full moon of change."

Grief and anger over Bryant Park cancellation

Fans of Bryant Park Project, NPR's web-based morning news service for younger audiences, are describing the show's pending cancellation as evidence that public radio is: (a. only interested in serving wealthy old fuddy-duddies; and, (b. doesn't have the stomach for experiments with new media. "NPR isn't giving up on the Web. It's just giving up on its younger audience members, the ones who don't have Scrooge McDuck-size moneybins they can dig into come pledge time," writes Daniel Holloway, a film critic who appears regularly on BPP, on Huffington Post. New York-based Globe and Mail correspondent Simon Houpt observes: [M]ember stations had no interest in ditching . . . Morning Edition for some upstart out of New York produced by a bunch of hipsters in their 20s and 30s. (Hipster is a relative term: They still worked for NPR.)" NPR is an "old media organization," Houpt writes, that lacked the "intestinal fortitude for a new-media experiment." Meanwhile, today's edition of BPP features segments on what to do if you're laid off and the powerful motivational effects of anger.