I am a big fan of moderation in most discussions…this one included. There are hacks in every business. I just wish that those hacks in journalism and the media didn’t play such a significant role in how we all think…but then, the citizenry has its fair share of hacks as well.

Thanks for a post that has me thinking…

But readers were always telling us how we had no important news in the newspaper. And when we’d point it out, “Oh. I missed that story.” And they’d tell us we had too much negative news. But put a juicy murder on the front page? That issue would fly off the newsstands. Put an “important” government or education story there? Pfft. Single-copy sales weren’t too great that day.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but it reminds me of that old saying, “The people get the government they deserve.” They get the journalism they deserve, too.

I often talk about the “responsibility of the audience” to be more discerning and I think this speaks, in part to a similar line of thinking, a similar series of circumstances.

Is it just the consumers? Are publishers in the mix too? ?We can all find blame everywhere, and in the end simply work hard – as writers, editors, publishers, publicists, newsmakers, and readers- to make our little corner of this ecosystem as good as we can (or in reality, want to).

But is marketing needed to promote a company or its product as much as the company/employees need to realize it’s a big world outside their corporate doors and that everyone — company and employee – must do their part to tell the world about themselves? Look at social networking sites, for instance; because of concepts such as EdgeRank, you may like a Facebook brand page, but there’s only a 17% chance you’ll see their updates. Having the page is what you call marketing, but promoting the page by word of mouth by those explicitly involved is something else.

I’d agree that companies can get noticed by telling their stories well, but many don’t have the skills to do that, or believe that even a little bit of talk is too “brash.” Xconomy does a great job of covering companies and is wonderful at finding companies early, but I still think there’s room for the louder approach. When you talk with many companies here you hear things like “we’re not investing in marketing because we need to keep focusing on engineering and coders.” Compare that with Phil’s comment at your event about Evernote Food. That application went out without a search bar, even though they knew they’d need one quickly. Why? Because the feeling was “get it out, get feedback, iterate.”

At LaunchCamp, Dharmesh Shah said something similar about early versions of HubSpot. They put out a product they knew could be better just to move and then iterate. In my experience that’s rare for New England companies.

Coming back to Dan Gillmor for a moment, he writes “Another reason to be skeptical is modern journalism’s equally unfortunate tendency of assigning apparently equal weight to opposing viewpoints when one is backed up by fact and the other is not, or when the ‘sides’ are overwhelmingly mismatched.”

That is often done in the name of “objectivity.”