it’s not good news when they in effect start writing even part of your professional obituary. We did this post yesterday about The up-and-coming, getting-better-and-better The Daily Beast “parting” ways with Howard Kurtz ostensibly due to an error he made in a story and the way he handled the correction and, reports suggest, for him putting a lot of work into another site.
Now The Politico pretty much puts the nail in the icon political coffin so it resembles a plan, old coffin with this piece which if isn’t a career obituary will most assuredly cement the narrative that he is not what he used to be. Can CNN’s cancellation of his “Reliable Sources” show be in the offing the first change CNN legitimately gets when contracting comes up? The Politico piece attributes some of the problems to Kurtz’s being a workhorse who spread himself too thin.
NYU’s Jay Rosen, always the most perceptive of media critics, says this in The Politico’s story:
”What would I go to this site for? As another place Howard Kurtz does his able thing on the week’s media news? Okay, but why does he need that? And why do we? He’s got the Daily Beast and CNN: plenty of platform,” Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, wrote in an email to POLITICO. “Daily Download resists understanding.”
Which was apparently the conclusion of The Daily Beast as well.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.