AJC editor: Blogs don't offer "core knowledge"

The irony in this web log is sometimes the postings speak against the very medium that I am now using to disseminate information, the web log.

The number-two man at one of the nation’s largest newspapers questions the public’s reliance on what we say on Web logs.

Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of The Atlanta Journal Constitution, was in Tuscaloosa Tuesday to sign copies of his new book, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. Here's a review of the book.

Along with calling for journalism professors like myself to focus on teaching the core values of the news-producing medium, Klibanoff questioned just how much stock the public puts in what it reads in the so-called blogosphere or what people read on web logs like this.

“The American people will not accept that as core knowledge they need to make decisions,” Klibanoff said.

It was an interesting take on the role of journalists today, which Klibanoff said must be produced by journalists who “write what they see” and aren’t afraid to hold those in government accountable and to “challenge the obvious.”

Klibanoff’s book signing coincided with the opening of a new exhibit at the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library on the University of Alabama Campus.

“They Came.. They Saw.. They Reported: Images from the World Press Coverage of Segregation’s Last Stand” focuses on the storytellers of the 1963 event for which Governor George Wallace is most remembered.

The photos were taken by UA Professor Emerita Camille Elebash, who witnessed Autherine Lucy’s attempt to role in the University in 1956. Elebash’s photos were published in The Graphic, “Tuscaloosa’s County’s Home Newspaper”