If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library's exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It's like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.
But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there's nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it's scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.
From the Washington Post.
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