Letter from the Editor | lawrence.com

Ilustration by J. Alex Stamos

Monday, June 16, 2008

This week we published issue No. 200 of our Deadwood Edition.

In some ways, this rag has come a long way these last five years. In other ways, we’re doing the same thing we’ve always done—lovin’ on Lawrence, lovey-dovey-style and tough-love-style. We hope you feel pretty much the same way.

Regardless, we’d like to know what you think about what we’ve been up to. This summer, we’re working on an overhaul of lawrence.com and we want to know what should stay, what should go, and what needs to be added. Point the internet browser of your choice to...

lawrence.com/survey

...and lay it all out. Whether you love lawrence.com or loathe it, even if you don’t feel like you’re very familiar with it, we want to hear from you. Of course, constructive criticism helps most, but we want it all, so long as it’s honest.

If you missed out on any or all of the first 199 issues, you can catch up at lawrence.com/deadwood. And if you’re really bored you can read a short history of this, your ragtag community culture rag, at lawrence.com/about.

200 issues of Deadwood on the wall

Behold! The covers of all 200 hundred issues displayed in a fun flash interface ... enjoy!

And if you’re really, really bored, you can read on as we congratulate ourselves for being loosely, however tenuously, associated with that thing some still refer to as “journalism.”

Ah, journalism.

“The freedom that makes all other freedom possible,” as veteran PBS reporter Bill Moyers put it a few days ago.

Put another way, truth makes freedom possible. And to the extent that journalism yields truth, well, that makes journalists pretty awesome.

As a ’merican, you may have grown used to this ultimate freedom. You may have even tired of being reminded of it, especially by journalists. But as long as we’re at it, know that something like 1/3 of the world’s countries still do not have a functionally free press, according to Reporters Without Borders.

The more cynical among you may argue that the U.S. doesn’t have a functionally free press either. There may be something to that. Reporters Without Borders ranks the U.S. No. 48 out of 169 countries in “press freedom,” behind countries such as Nicaragua and Bosnia.

Thoughtful consumers of the U.S. media may not be surprised by this ranking, even for a country whose “Freedom of the Press” is some 200 years old now. Among the things that ail our press:

• The prevalence of fear-mongering blowhards and bleeds-it-leads stories, which dominate our national “discourse” (unless, of course, it's this scary, bleeding story).

• The ease that this “discourse” has had in shaping national policy, such as declaring pre-emptive war on a country under the press-promoted pretense that the “smoking gun could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” even without proof of any weapons of mass destruction.

• The accelerating consolidation of media owners undermining voices that are independent of corporate interests and/or advertising purse-strings.

Oh, one could go on and on. And on, and on, and on...and on. It’s regrettably easy to be indignant these days. And what good does it do?

It can do a lot of good, actually. The internets promise hope for both the rebirth of worthwhile journalism and, by extension, the rebirth of our democracy (this site is particularly promising). Sure, that could be a bit naïve, or a least sound like it’s coming from a sentimental Pollyanna, not from an appropriately cynical journalist. But I won’t belabor the point—I think those of you paying attention know what I’m talking about...

We here at lawrence.com are blessed with a few of the critical ingredients necessary for survival in this brave new internets media world. We’ve got the superbadass reporters, bloggers, artists, and active online community members. We’ve got the creative brainiacs who can program the crap out of some internets. We’re part of a family-owned business that cares about journalism (rather than a bank-owned business concerned only with healthy profit margins), one that entrusts us a long, long leash to do what we see fit. And, most importantly, we’re part of a community that’s artistically and intellectually driven to carpe the freakin’ diem.

That’s all by way of saying we’re grateful to have had this gig for 200 issues, and look forward to the next 200, si dios quiere.

And now let us leave you for now with an old quote:

“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all avenues of the truth.”

—Thomas Jefferson

Don’t forget about that survey «

Comments

lawrence.com does not necessarily agree with comments posted below - responsibility lies with the relevant user alone. Read our full policy

lawrence.com/survey

Comments

Post a comment