Today in The Assault On Film Criticism: two salvos from journalists who just don’t seem to get the online tools and communities that they’ve credited with having ar too much power. Since neither argument is new I would have ignored these stories individually, but together…

Let’s start with The Wrap, and the kind of story they seem to publish a lot of: 300 words, no news, hyperbolic conclusions. This one’s about FlickTweets, a new site that compiles Twitter updates from about movies — gasp! — normal people. The Wrap’s Maria Russo says the site “could be what helps studios and film critics, not usually the best of friends, find common cause. Both are under siege by the armies of critics at the movies these days packing iPhones and Blackberries.” Theorizing that FlickTweets “could be disastrous for the movie business,” Russo concludes by insulting the intelligence of just about everyone in The Wrap’s target audience: “it’s not clear that the studios — or film critics — could even come up with a defensive strategy.”

As if both studio reps and critics — not to mention filmmakers — weren’t already on Twitter, engaging with their potential viewers and readers, expanding the public conversation about film far beyond the “tiny jewels of insight” that Russo dismisses. As if Twitter wasn’t already working to promote both low-impact audience engagement (witness Moon director Duncan Jones using Twitter to give away posters, or @MiramaxFilms participating in today’s user-generated #unlikelysequels meme) and high brow debate (see the ongoing conflicts over The Limits of Control, which began about a week before the movie opened and died down about mid-way through its second week — correlative to the film’s big opening and substantive second weekend slide, perhaps?)

Let’s move on to this story on the obsolescence of print critics by John Podhoretz, the (cough) critic for the print journal the Weekly Standard, which started making the rounds over the weekend. Many seem to be rolling eyes most aggressively at this bit:

Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously educated one is in the field–by which I mean the more obscure the storehouse of cinematic knowledge a critic has–the less likely it is that one will have anything interesting to say to an ordinary person who isn’t all that interested in the condition of Finnish cinema

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I don’t really have a problem with that part — I mean, sure, as someone with actual academic credentials, I guess it should piss me off, but I understand that I work in a personality game, in which point-of-view pyrotechnics are more valuable than things like my deep store of knowledge on the Freed Unit. No, it’s these chunks that makes mad:

…there aren’t fewer voices, but many, many more. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of working critics on the Web in all fields. There are book bloggers and film bloggers and dance bloggers and music bloggers. The only difference between them and the professionals is that they don’t get paid, except for a few dollars a week from Google ads…Amateurism in the best sense will lead to some very interesting work by people whose primary motivation is simply to express themselves in relation to the work they’re seeing–a purer critical impulse than the one that comes with collecting a paycheck along the way.

As if all the new Sarrises and Kaels have been suppressed by the tyranny of editors and paychecks. As if passion is a surefire guarantor not only of “purity”, but of quality. As if the entire internet were just an organic garden that supports itself. As if the words you’re reading now weren’t composed by someone getting paid to do so, on a website emblazoned with advertisements.