Terrific piece, out of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, by Dan Kennedy on getting news within the embrace of one’s community. It won’t settle the hash about the danger of only talking with like-minded people (a danger I’m less worried about than others), but it puts the positive well.

Here’s the final paragraph:

Critics of blogs have been looking at the wrong thing. While traditionalists disparage bloggers for their indulgence of opinion and hyperbole, they overlook the sense of community and conversation that blogs have fostered around the news. What bloggers do well, and what news organizations do poorly or not at all, is give their readers someone to sit with. News consumers — the public, citizens, us — still want the truth. But we also want to share it and talk about it with our like-minded neighbors and friends. The challenge for journalism is not that we’ll lose our objectivity; it’s that we won’t find a way to rebuild a sense of community.

[Tags: journalism media blogging objectivity echo_chambers dan_kennedy nieman ]