Ben Buckman.net

Josh Marshall, visionary founder of Talking Points Memo, spoke at the Columbia Journalism school yesterday:

We also need to embrace, rather than question, the notion of audience engagement. [...] Yet people “who are so focused on their journalism—so focused on their stories,” Marshall said, deprive themselves and their audiences of the engagement that is, and must be recognized as being, the core of the journalistic mission.

Marshall singled out for criticism the kind of ‘he said/she said’ journalism that, no matter how often it’s decried by media critics and the general public, is still alive and well in reporting. “One of the great failings of journalism has been the tendency to emphasize balance over accuracy,” Marshall said. Reporters’ “excessive regard for balance” positions journalism not with, but against, “the core of what sustains it: a fundamental honesty with readers.”