Pull your socks up, hack…

One of the wonderful things about the new, all pervasive “I’ll never read a magazine again” world of social media that we haven’t really talked too much about is the ability to comment directly on the quality of a journalist’s writing…or lack of it. In the dark and gloomy bad old word of ink on paper, if a hack wrote a shoddy article we’d merely grumble into our pints and possibly consider a letter to the editor. But now – praise be – with more and more editorial appearing online in the form of blogs, we can comment with abandon.

A case in point has arrived in our inbox from our old buddy Mr BadHack. As some of you will know, BadHack was a blog set up to highlight less than exemplary behaviour of the journalistic community. Surprising to us all, however, a lack of content seems to have done for Mr BH and he’s been quiet for a long, long while. So it was nice to hear from him.

He points us to this extremely superficial review of Microsoft’s new Media Player on eWeek’s Microsoft Watch site. Previously, such a shoddy piece of journalism would’ve passed and been forgotten, but not in the new age. Now people can comment…and boy, have they?! Stuff like this:

“I could write a more extensive (and USEFUL) from the time my cheeks hit the porcelain to the time my hand hits the two-ply.”

“Get some info, not vapid spin.”

“Seriously, they call this journalism?”

“You call this a "review"! .... pure drivel....”

“I used to get F's for this type of thing in high school”

Nothing like a bit of feedback, eh? No response, as yet, from the journalist Jim Rapoza.

It’s great though, isn’t it, to think that hacks across the industry are sitting at their desks, fingers trembling over the keyboard, nervously considering whether to his the “publish post” button, wondering whether their piece really is good enough to stand up to critical scrutiny and the response that might be delivered instantly?

Aren’t they?