People of NPR:
Background: I have been a loyal and admiring listener to NPR since the late 1970s. For most of that time I've depended upon your news programming for my bearings in the world, and you haven't let me down.
However...
For some time I have regarded the increasing irrelevance of mass media with something approaching rueful glee. I used to read the NY Times - no more. I once felt incomplete without the New Yorker in my mailbox. That's over. Recently, the same dissociative process has been happening with NPR.
To clarify: I long ago tired of your member stations' playing the same top 40 classical chestnuts from dawn until midnight. Recently I've begun losing patience with your flagship news teams on ATC and Morning Edition. I still admire many of your reporters, and Bob Edwards is a great American voice. But your approaches to many stories, your notions of what stories are, and how they can and ought to be told, are leaving me cold.
Why this disaffection? Primarily because the Net is offering far more insightful, vivid, creative modes of conversation and presentation, by individuals worldwide who are living in the worlds major media only tells us of. Folks who think for themselves, who have nothing to gain by palliating truth, and who experience the world without the gravitational pull of Washington D.C. 24 hours a day.
No plainer evidence of your current loss of authority can be found than a policy you have instituted, which I only today became aware of - your ban on links to NPR without prior permission - found here:
http://www.npr.org/about/linking_form.html
To people on the Web, this is tantamount to saying: Before you pick up the phone to call anyone - your mother, your best friend - you must get permission from the telephone company.
Don't imagine this analogy is misleading or extreme. This is how it is, and how we feel. If you do not understand this, you are in far more jeopardy than I imagined only yesterday.
You cannot be ignorant of the response to a similar uncomprehending policy attempted by the Dallas Morning News. I would be greatly interested in learning the motive and rationale for your policy from someone in your organization.
Yours, but for how long?
Tom Matrullo
