Hi Billy, On Dec 1, 2009, at 2:22 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Actually I did read that part. Think I over-simplified my comments, though. > At least the impression I got was that she seemed to say that one standard > is professional, the other "whatever comes in." Then it is up to the pros > to do the fact checking and correct grammar and the like.
That wasn't my impression at all. Her high-order point is that the future of journalism will involve a mixture of "paid" and "amateur" journalists. The reality is that some amateurs are better at fact-checking (and spell-checking!) than many professionals, and it is pointless to pretend that "paid" means "good" and "amateur" means "bad". What really will happen is that different sites will evolve communities -- like ours here! -- with different levels of interaction between "readers", "writers", and "editors". Some of these roles will be paid, others not. There will be many ways to get paid -- advertising, academic tenure, non-profit foundations, etc. The ugly unmentioned fact is that "old" media virtually all had only a single business model: support by mass-market advertising, with the consumer at most paying for distribution. In the Brave New World, there'll be a lot more diversity. Yes, the short-term will be painful. Plus, there won't be a single "obvious" model. Each of us -- yes, including you, Billy -- will have to figure out what model works for our particular goals, and it may be very different than what works for someone else. But that's a good thing. -- Ernie P. _______________________________________________ Centroids mailing list: [email protected] http://radicalcentrism.com/mailman/listinfo/centroids_radicalcentrism.com Archives at http://radicalcentrism.org/pipermail/centroids_radicalcentrism.com/
