the author provides the outline and everyone else fills in their part perfectly

GK emphasizes journalism has become a 2-way street, a conversation. Very true.

However, what should be more obvious about this conversation: journalists must take a more conversational tone, be less presumptuous of their authority, and less preachy. Rather than phoning in the old cliches, journalists must take a more post-modern approach to editorializing, and embrace disagreement.

Too many journalists are essentially fossilized pundits, even younger ones, cliches derivative of the 60's + 70's.

Salon for example seems to have made an executive level decision to embrace a kind of 'PC' left-centric, cultural lowest-common denominator, on a number of issues such as race, feminism, gay rights, etc. A PC lowest common denominator that may be a statistically accurate amalgam of left opinion, but which has no real constituency outside the pundit world.

By comparison take the blogger Josh Marshall of TPM. He does some factual/authoritative reporting, but on editorial matters he always walks people through his thought process, concedes where he could be wrong, where more information could be helpful, etc.

Example of a cliche crap Salon has taken heat over: Obama isn't black enough, which presumed the author is an authority on blackness and is given the right to award blackness to others. Maybe it was a bothed attempt at reverse sychology, maybe it was... ? who knows. It's central premise was so revolting whatever good points it had were completly lost. GK's attempt at a counterpoint was better, but also meandering, and received a lot of fair criticism.

There are some high concept reasons why Salon needs to choose another direction, but basically Salon just needs to do better and choose better writers.

I wouldn't have thought it’d take an article quite this long to tell Salon readers all about what it's like to read and respond at Salon. But hey, it's not like trees were cut down.

Two things: I don't think all these voices are going to make the debate "flatten out." As long as there are thoughtful and articulate voices, they will differ in their opinions and we will be entertained, informed and stimulated. I keep waiting for the letters pages at Salon to devolve into the kind of semi-literate drooling and turd-flinging one sees at the "Post Your Thoughts" areas of places like AOL, but it isn't happening -- far from it.

Second thing, and this applies to the subset of writers who are specifically journalists, if that distinction has validity anymore: I will feel that the oversight, if you will, of the writer's work by his/her readers has truly born fruit when it is simply no longer possible for a mainstream news outlet to allow one politician to accuse another of advocating that we "cut and run" in Iraq when the second politician has merely suggested that we draw down our troops in an orderly fashion in order to allow the Iraqis to fight their own civil war -- or to paint every legislator who voted to give GWB the authority to use force with having "voted for the war" (meaning, by implication, this particular war, the way it's been waged, etc.). This kind of mislabeling, of allowing the wrong people to choose, unchallenged, the vocab in which the issues are framed, is considered normal sound-bite journalism these days and I would love to see it stop.

I was disappointed to hear the authors whom I really respect, like Traister, let the trolls get to them. I'm not going to sit around and moralize and tell them to get tough-- but that's what has to happen.

As an old-time activist, I've stood in front of a crowd of 400 screaming people yelling for my death, with little or no support around me to keep that from happening. It's part of the game. I wasn't scared-- killing me would have been difficult, and I would have taken a couple of them with me. Maybe I'm just brain-dead, but I've always figured that in a complacent world, the BEST thing that can happen is to see people react. Jethro Tull said it best-- "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think." In a world where we accept science-fiction warfare against an entire region (think the Middle East) as something nominally acceptable and something easily ignorable, the least we can do for the masses that are really suffering is take the heat. No one said that being a prophet is easy-- because it isn't.

All writers that write in hope of social change have to accept, fundamentally, what I call the power of latency-- that ideas you advance now will cause you to be scorned and spurned, but will become the mainstream. Think of Martin Luther King-- or Malcolm X. No one anywhere will dare speak against diversity.

And even in my small world-- regarding protection of roadless forests-- the former Governor of Idaho stepped forward just two months ago, in this, the reddest of Red States, and declared, fundamentally, his support for protection of our remaining wild forests. Quite a change for only ten years, where predecessors had been arguing for clearcutting the lot of it.

The game is not for the meek. It is just a fact. Time to face it-- or get out.

Once Premium, Twice Shy - totally nailed it.

Yes, the better articles get less feedback generally. It's the crappy articles that generate infuriated posts, and if that's an incentive for clicks... that business model is a downwards spiral, eventually arriving at supermarket checkout stands.

All I'd add to OPTS's comment is that good journalism can be written in a conversational manner which encourages intelligent feedback. Again citing Josh Marshall, he exposes the framework of his thought process, does so humbly enough to encourage conversation and not lynch mobs very often.

Gary, you note that well-written, thoughtful articles tend to attract fewer responses generally and fewer negative comments specifically. I agree. One proof is the usual level of response to Sidney Blumenthal's pieces. They are magnificently articulate. They provoke few comments.

So what does this say about Salon generally? If anyone is descending into mediocre rants and thuggish thinking, it's Salon's writers and editors. It's worsening by the month. It's as if there's a contest among your contributors. Who can hit bottom the fastest? Will it be Patrick Smith, wishing that he'd been in an aircrash--but SURVIVED! Or Garrison Keillor again his geriatric anger with MODERN MANNERS! Debra J Dickerson blogging her skin-bleaching treatments to BECOME WHITE! Or perhaps Video Dog posting... Never mind. VD hit bottom the day it appeared.

Too harsh? Not nearly. If you publish crap, expect to have it flung back at you.

-- Once Premium, Twice Shy