Social Media as the New Frontier

I don't know if he was being real or sarcastic, but here's Garrison Keillor this morning:

"Bloggers are writers who've been liberated from editors, and some of them take you back to the thrilling days of frontier journalism, before the colleges squashed the profession."

When I was just out of j-school, I had two interviews with the editors of the daily sister papers. The afternoon editor told me he didn't hire j-school grads because they were too trained and he wanted out-of-the-box thinkers with diverse backgrounds. The morning editor told me I was too out of the box, my background too diverse. The model for the female journalist at the time was a spinster with ferociously correct grammatical skills and safety pins on her blouse where buttons should be.

That hasn't got much to do with what Keillor wrote, but I'm practicing frontier journalism this morning. Back to Keillor:

"This is the beauty of new media: It isn't so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people e-mail it to friends and slowly it floods the country. "