The Excellence is Too Damn High

I love this: One Daily Dish reader is "irate" over the number of excellent articles (50-60 per day) the website cranks out. "This is just too much damn volume," he wrote. "Reading your blog has become too damn much work. It is just too much cool stuff. I know this might mean fewer hits on your blog, but ... Please, turn off the fire hose."

This perfectly captures the conundrum for web journalism. Sacrifice quantity, and you drive away visitors, plus the advertisers (your revenue) who want the hits. Sacrifice quality, and you drive away loyal readers. It's a digital "Catch-22." The result is the Huffington Post (a sugary tabloid) at one end, and the Daily Dish (a nourishing meal for the mind) on the other. HuffPo enriched its founder. The Dish barely makes a nickel. For web journalists, the dream is to create lean, quality work at a reasonable profit. But no one (except the Wall Street Journal which serves a narrow, moneyed audience) has done it yet.

In every other market sphere, consumers unhesitatingly pay for quality. Yet most will barely invest a dime in the quality products (serious blogs, newspapers, magazines) that enrich or inform the mind. It speaks volumes about our culture. It wasn't always this way. At America's founding, and for decades following it, erudition was highly prized. Indeed, we felt it was an obligation. As historian Daniel Walker Howe found, "Many an American, rural as well as urban, poor as well as middle-class, embraced the ethos of ... intellectual improvement. The young Abraham Lincoln with his book by the firelight shared this outlook."

Then modernity happened. Since WWII, there's been an intellectual unraveling. Quantum leaps in technology -- from radio to today's web-enabled smart devices -- have only sped the decline. Inventions that have enabled easier access to informal scholarship should have boosted our thirst for it. (Early America would have loved it.) Instead, our brilliant machines have had the opposite effect. We're dumbing down at an astonishing rate. Clearly, something is amiss in our cultural ethos when learning is viewed as "too damn much work." That so many have joined "The Excellence Is Too Damn High" bandwagon should give us all pause.