Vintage Journalism

Surfing through lunch because it’s too cold for the park, I notice a post on kottke.org about a Vintage Web blog. I start to click on the link, stop, think about the words for a minute. Vintage web design? I fumble through my purse for some vintage aspirin, a carefully preserved artifact of last fall’s cold. Then I click through. And indeed, the site consists of screenshots of sites with old-fashioned designs (1990s, to be precise).

There are days I feel old-fashioned myself. Days when the cyberworld seems a little too William James, “a blooming, buzzing confusion” of images and audio getting swirled like somebody’s fingerpainting inside my brain. Reading about the future (?) of journalism, trying to keep up with a prognosis that’s changing every hour, I come across near-evangelical posts about “crowd sourcing” (asking you all for the information we need to report a story) and flash back to the days of “community journalism” (asking you all what you want to read) and wonder why it’s so hard for a profession that holds balance as its royal standard to find the right balance of anything.

Especially when the purpose of what we do hasn’t changed one bit.

—Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer