In a new twist on what’s become the near-constant pleading for donations from JTA, President Elisa Spungen Bildner insults producers of new media explicitly:
Without a strong JTA, the storytelling will be left to bloggers, twitterers, and non-professionals. Is this the best way for our future Jewish stories to be told and recorded?
And insulting new media producers is actually only part of it: just where does Spungen Bildner think that the many local Jewish newspapers fit into this equation? They’re rarely bloggers or twitterers, so I guess the New York Jewish Week, LA Jewish Journal, and New Jersey Jewish News are “non-professionals”? I’ve leveled many a criticism at various print Jewish media purveyors, but calling them “non-professionals” is something we had to wait for Spungen Bildner to do — someone whose JTA organization, by the way, gains a significant chunk of its revenues by charging all of those papers thousands of dollars per year to reprint JTA content. Oh, and of course I failed to include in that list the Forward, whose previous executive editor, Ami Eden, is now JTA’s editor-in-chief, and the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent — whose Editor Lisa Hostein was editor-in-chief of JTA until a year ago.
And the insult to new media producers is particularly galling at a time when JTA is pleading with bloggers and twitterers to make JTA relevant again with a notice in the most prominent location of its front page…
While Spungen Bildner’s disdain for new media producers can perhaps be attributed to the fact that these efforts by JTA to recruit new media producers into making them relevant have thus far failed (as of this writing, the most recent posts to Kavod are 11 days old, and JBlogs seems to produce no noticeable traffic), it’s nonetheless truly galling to see JTA speaking out of both sides of its mouth in this manner.
