Journalistic lenses

Minneapolis, Minnesota


A strength of bona fide journalists, an ability to note the details of what is in front of them and relate those to what they have seen before, also can be a weakness: an inability to see anything except what is in front of them, colored by what they have seen before. Case in point: In her May 6 Washington Post column, The Classical Beat, Anne Midgette questions the efficacy and viability of Social Network, the newly-launched, social media site of the San Francisco Symphony, because other, similar sites are not up to snuff.


The presumed existence of an informed readership and citizenry suggests that if newspapers would provide us with just the news, we can provide our own degrees of cynicism.