Why Jeff Jarvis is annoying, installment No. 647

Matthew DeBord provides the details. New-media visionary Jarvis has just discovered customizable kit cars and thinks they're the automotive-manufacturing model of the future. Think of it: they're kind of like blogs!

Particularly amusing is that Jarvis says at the outset that he only drives Toyotas, because he never wants to open his hood or touch a wrench. Yet the present target market of Local Motors, the start-up company he touts (which sounds like a pleasant-enough venture), is gearheads. This incongruence does not waylay Jarvis on the road to hyperbole, as he suggests that Local Motors is going to leave G.M. (for which he has only profanity-laced disdain) in the dust.

Does anyone besides Jarvis think that Local Motors's products, "designed collaboratively by communities and built in microfactories across the country by staffs of only 41 using almost entirely off-the-shelf parts," will be as reliable as cars made by Toyota, Honda, or, indeed, G.M.? To the contrary, hands-on upkeep appears precisely to be part of what Local Motors is selling.

While we're having fun, let's go right to Installment No. 648. The following graphic, from a more recent Jarvis post, represents a journalistic model that Jarvis believes is a radical departure from the present one:

Let me take a stab at parsing this: you brainstorm story ideas, then do some reporting, write up your findings, correct errors when they are pointed out, and do follow-ups. Why didn't we idiot journalists think of that?

PS: Edited for clarity, 6/9, at 10:07.