Jarvis vs. Rosenbaum, Cont'd

Remember that delightful food fight a few weeks ago between blog oracle Jeff Jarvis and Slate's Ron Rosenbaum, who accused Jarvis of dancing on traditional journalism's grave? In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan steps in as mediator to pronounce them both right -- but maybe Jarvis a little more so.

Rosenbaum, she says, is correct to say most journalists simply want to practice journalism as they see it rather than try to tailor their efforts to the shifting modes of consumption cycling through the market. But for those journalists to think what they're doing is somehow platform agnostic, however, is mistaken:

In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to "tell great stories" or "make arresting images." You don't study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to produce certain numbers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be succinct when a publication loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an "article" is understood mostly as a delivery vehicle for pictures of a sexy celebrity. The words stack up under certain kinds of headlines that also adhere to strict conventions as to size and tone, and eventually they appear alongside certain kinds of photos and illustrations with certain kinds of captions on pages of certain dimensions that are often shared with advertisements. Just as shooting film for a Hollywood movie is never just filming and acting in a TV ad is never just acting, writing for a magazine is never just writing.