You’ve heard this one a million times before: when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. As an observation on obstacles and how we confront them, it’s a two-penny insight. But it cuts deeper. What we like to think of as our store of worldly wisdom might be no more than a bag of reflexes based on intriguing scraps of learning collected as we reached the age of reason. We think of these as proprietary insights even if they aren’t, and apply them to every quandary whether or not we ought to.
The other day I wrote a Bleader post on Tribune writers taking buyouts. Times are tough at the Tribune, where no one’s had a pay raise in five years and top talent is bailing out. At the bottom of my piece, readers had their say, and these comments regurgitated a familiar debate. “It’s a sad thing to watch [journalism] die off like this,” someone wrote. “And it’s the Internet that’s killing it.” That’s not exactly true, said the next comment: “It’s not simply the internet’ that has been killing journalism. It has been journalism’s resistance to change that has caused the problems.”
I read these hopeful propositions. I got excited. And I thought of The Song of the Messiah.
