I agree with this comment, though:
WHO gets to tell their story? The subjects or the (privileged, white albeit female) observers? If the answer is the observers then this can only be exploitation. Voyeurism which gives white people yet another excuse to hold the Other at arm's length while all the while assuming they know what they are about... basic, Nanook of the North stuff, really.
Because it's a pretty basic fucking rule of journalism that you are not the story. You may be telling the story but it's not your story, so get the fuck out of the way. You are there to tell the stories of others, not to tell the story of you telling the story of others. If you don't know the difference, read more journalism. Read good stuff, lots of it, and then emulate it. Or go back to school. Save the stories about you in the new place for your mom. She's the only one who cares.
I get so insane about this kind of thing because it's such a wasted opportunity. You have unbelievable access to a family's story, institutional backing and an audience some bloggers would kill for. And you use it to talk about this? That's what you get out of the experience, that's what you give your readers? What massive fail.
The other reason I get so insane about this shit is that it's bad journalistic precedent and it's usually taken as trend rather than aberration by media critics. The fact that Knight is supporting this makes ne nuts. And it's just going to provide one more example for old-media assholes to use to dump on everybody on the Interwebs, and talk shit about young girls being unable to do serious work. As if the demographic is the problem and not, you know, individual people being idiots and having never had an editor smack the shit out of them for being masturbatory in print.
It's just bad journalism. And what's more, it's not even original bad journalism. Being a self-indulgent tourist in your own goddamn world is something newspaper columnists PIONEERED. I mean, I read crap like this in the Tribune all the time, when they send reporters to parts of the city that aren't Wicker Park or Bucktown and they act like anthropologists, observing the creatures in their natural habitat. What's more they make the unconscionable assumption that nobody in these places they couldn't even spell before they got there reads their paper or would take offense at being described like animals on a safari.
This "watch me live among the strangoids" narrative device creates distance and allows the audience to pretend they're not the same as us, we're not the same as them, our fate is not your fate. When the entire purpose of your time on this earth and your job as a reporter, as a witness to the world, is to do the exact fucking opposite.
One of the first blog-based books, the anthology Special Plans examines Feith's role in misleading America into war. Buy from 
The two girls who are living with the family also don't claim it's journalism. The Entrway as it exists right now is just their personal story. They are upfront about that.
Also Knight isn't supporting this. Spot.Us has put money into a pot that the girls hope to use to fundraise so they can do original reporting that will not feature them but tell the story of those in the neighborhood.
Posted by: Note | April 01, 2010 at 17:01
@Note, the site is called "The Entryway. Two Reporters Move Into A New America". So yeah, this is supposed to be journalism. And why does it take 2 of the whitest of white people to tell the story of MacArthur Park, anyway?
It's amazing to me how offensively clueless these 2 women are. Ugh.
Posted by: grrljock | April 01, 2010 at 17:14
You sound like you're grinding your teeth, A. And that's...okay... Trying to be Stuart Smalley and failing.
Posted by: Adrastos | April 01, 2010 at 18:49
"Because it's a pretty basic fucking rule of journalism that you are not the story. You may be telling the story but it's not your story, so get the fuck out of the way"
I wish you could shout that from the housetops. While living on the SE coast, everytime a hurricane came through, we were deluged with "reporters" who spent 1/2 the time on the fact that they were there and 1/4 of the time on useable information.
Local TV news announcers seem to have picked up that the story is that they are reporting on the story.
Posted by: MapleStreet | April 02, 2010 at 11:30
But the story is that the story is being reported, snapping wave-forms into place and creating reality.
It's the quantum theory of journalism.
If they didn't report on it, it wouldn't exist.
Posted by: mark robbins | April 06, 2010 at 10:46
I had to stop at the first entry and boiling water for her "charcoal face mask." WTF?
Posted by: Lauren | April 06, 2010 at 11:04