The good people over at Pegasus News have an interesting post up about the Guardian Angels, old comic books, and the New media and bloggers, titled Guardian Pegasi?; the jist:
Now maybe I read too many comic books as a kid, but I remember the square-jawed goons were always looking over their shoulder to see if some nosy cub reporter was around the corner. ‘Cos in an old-timey narrowly-drawn geographic beat system that newspapers used to employ, there was a fair chance they might be.
And maybe it’s a day’s worth of paint fumes talking. (The living
room is well stippled, thank you.) But it seems to me that if a
hypothetical news organization had a crew of 50-70 professional
reporters, stringers and Citizen Journalists roaming the city, armed
with cell phones and cameras; investigating every neighborhood crime
they could scoop and actively patrolling for neighborhood news — our
little burg might not be in such dire need of saving. Because that, in
and of itself, might be almost as much of a deterrent as a vigilant(e)
group of volunteers.Sure, we might be wearing fedoras with press tags instead of Sliwa’s
red berets, but we wouldn’t be making the kind of confrontational
citizens’ arrests that make the Angels so controversial and potentially
dangerous. Instead we’d be informing the citizenry. And it would be
informing us. And each other.
I know, the blog cheerleading is getting nauseating at this point; but perhaps that’s just b/c our matching berets haven’t come in yet.
{from Pegasus News}