Following up on my earlier post Journalism is not how I describe to people what we do here at ye olde blog. At best, it’s advocacy journalism. Somehow (with your help and indulgence) we’ve managed to hang on since the aughts, post-Facebook and post-Twitter, while traditional journalism has lost ground to propaganda-inflected social media and cultural influencers. I wince at “influencers,” but suppose they get traction the same way Digby explained bloggers did in our heyday (2007): If you have something to say you can say it–and if it touches a chord, people will return time and again to read what you’ve written and discuss the issues of the day with others who are reading the same things. […] Each of us finds their niche. I’m a blogger pundit, a role for which I am eminently qualified, since, exactly like pundits on television and in newspapers, I have opinions, I write them down, and a lot of people read them. (Yes, that’s all there is to it. Sorry Mr. Broder.). But with fascism American-style on the rise and newspapers going the way of the dodo, traditional journalists need to ply their trade in the world as it is, not as they’d prefer it to be. Same with Democrats. Gideon Lichfield at Nieman Labs argues that “It’s time for American journalism to rewrite its own job description” in an age where drawing eyeballs means eating. Accountability journalism has faltered in this political environment, warped the way “a black hole distorts spacetime.”…