the kicker

John Darnton on Those Watchdog Web Sites

Another note from the Consumer Revolution conference: John Darnton, a forty-year veteran...
November 20, 2008

Another note from the Consumer Revolution conference: John Darnton, a forty-year veteran of The New York Times, has his doubts about the much-heralded economic-modeling potential of VoiceofSanDiego.org and similar “watchdog” Web sites: “It’s like finding life on other planets,” he said. “Yes, there may be a few planets that have the special chemical agreements to make them occur”–in VoiceofSanDiego’s case, veteran columnists and funders with deep pockets–but such confluence of circumstances is more a matter of serendipity than sustainability, Darnton says.

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.