arrogant bastard ale, courtesy of *0ne*

I don’t know exactly when Steven Pearlstein started his transition from a good writer into some kind of pod person, but the metamorphosis of WaPo’s finance writer is apparently complete. Salon writer Glen Greenwald has written a few times about Pearlstein’s odd combination of smug “I told you so” and ever-changing positions and just today has posted a highly detailed article titled Steven Pearlstein and the strange pro-bailout justifications. (No, this is not a rerun of when I mentioned his last assault on his readers a month ago.)

When a questioner today attempted to call him out on this pattern of shifting, Pearlstein responded.

This is pretty indicative of the bloggers view of the world. They write about what other people write about. And the mainstream media writes about what’s going on in the world.

I sometimes get a little peeved at the letters to the editor in the WaPo bitching about bias in editorials and analysis, for reasons that a letter-writer expressed perfectly here. However it seems that the people who need lessons in the different kinds of writing includes some of the people writing it. Maybe Pearlstean has forgotten that he’s an analyst, not a reporter, and what he is doing is described perfectly as writing about what others write.

To his credit, he also says “And if you decide I’m not someone you want to read, then don’t read it,” Okay, if you’re that cavalier about whether or not people believe you to be a credible source of information then that’s your right. Just don’t mistake an interest in knowing whether any given statement from a person as a “bloggers view of the world.” That’s what a media-savvy view of the world, and if you’re not interested in having those people as your readers then perhaps you should consider who that leaves you with.

I was an early skeptic of Twitter, but I’ve become a convert to the 140 character way of life. I follow several different crowds of friends on Twitter, and have even started to follow some Twitter identities that aren’t human beings. These vary from the Mars Phoenix to CNN Breaking News and tend to deliver news up-to-the-minute and in small chunks, the way I like to consume it. Some assume an anthropomorphic identity, but others just write concise, less-than-140 character posts that give me an idea of what’s going on in the world.

When I saw that WAMU 88.5, DC’s public radio station, had a Twitter account, I signed on right away. I was hopeful they’d engage with other users, and provide great local tidbits. Instead, every now and then they post a bunch of unintelligible links with truncated first sentences from the same stuff they put on their website. There’s virtually no readable content, no idea what the link is to, and 5-10 of these useless posts all in a row.

This isn’t the way Twitter works. At the very least, they need to write 140 character summaries with a short link to the article. Ideally, they’d let their reporters post from their cell phones throughout the day as they report on DC, MD, and VA. They’d allow followers to reply and engage with them. Twitter is not just a place to republish an RSS feed (poorly). It’s an ecosystem that encourages conversations and interaction, and until WAMU learns how to do that, they’re no longer welcome on my follow list.