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May 23, 2005
The Daily News gets it
...the Internet, that is, which is an unusual thing among mainstream news outlets, most of which treat the online world as a threat to be resisted. The New York Daily News not only provides most of its content online for free, as Charles G. Hill notes, it doesn't even require registration.
The Daily News has also embraced blog technology by providing 29 different RSS feeds, corresponding to different sections of the paper, along with links to several RSS readers.
Now the Daily News has decided there's value in introducing its dead-tree readers to the blogosphere, and rather than firing an employee for blogging, it has assigned the beat to a blogging employee. Copy editor Dawn Eden's maiden column was in Sunday's edition.
What I found remarkable was the appearance right there in the piece of Dawn's URL. Recall that at the heart of Dawn's firing by the New York Post was the fear that the Post's reputation with its readers would be "sullied" by association with a passionately pro-life, socially conservative, and unabashedly Christian blog. The Daily News evidently isn't plagued by such irrational concerns, even though Ben Smith, blogger for the New York Observer, seems to think it should be, writing in advance of the first column's publication:
This is such a perfect snapshot of the way in which the News constantly gets tangled over its own feet in trying to be, and yet not be, the Post. Hiring a woman banished from Murdoch-land for conservatism somehow crystallizes that.But it's also a classic News misstep. Eden's not a New York conservative like Ryan Sager or Robert George, the younger, libertarian generation on the Post's editorial page who represent, in some way, the way in which the movement has a future in New York. Her conservatism is more U.S. House of Representatives....
After the column's appearance, Smith explained himself:
We'd just note that our original post wasn't about setting rules for who should write for New York papers; it was about the News, a New York institution that's desperately trying to break its chains to an aging, dying, readership. That means the paper, which employs some of the smartest journalists in town, needs to be part of the city's ongoing conversation.And the questions of whether homosexuality is a sin, a perversion, or the fault of Sponge-Bob just aren't part of that conversation. It's not that they're forbidden topics. It's that they're irrelevant topics, settled questions, to the readers they're hoping to attract.
And that's where Smith makes his own misstep, and where the Daily News has an opportunity if it can look beyond the insular world of the newsroom. Those may be irrelevant topics and settled questions for most of New York's journalists, but there are millions in the New York area for whom the topics are very relevant. A recent census of New York City's evangelical churches counted 1.5 million attending them. Add to that number perhaps millions of devout and socially conservative Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, and adherents of other faiths. These New Yorkers see the damage done by rampant divorce, family abandonment, and the sexualization of children. They may still vote liberal out of long habit and with a view to the pocketbook. Their social conservatism may not translate into conservative voting patterns -- yet -- but that may be because the local Republican establishment prefers to be an echo, not a real choice, on social issues. (There's another institution that needs to recognize the opportunity before it.)
Porno-cons, cannabis-cons, South Park Republicans -- there are plenty of voices in New York media speaking to those constituencies. But where do socially conservative New Yorkers find news and analysis that respects and reflects their priorities and concerns? There are a few places: They can find it on Kevin McCullough's talk radio show, and thanks to this new blog column, some Daily News readers will find it on The Dawn Patrol.
The Daily News deserves credit for being unashamed to give a social conservative blogger a byline, but they'd deserve even more credit -- and tap into an overlooked market -- if they'd give Dawn Eden an outlet for her passionate and pointed social commentary. (This, for example.)
Posted by Michael at May 23, 2005 10:37 PM
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