Ernie : 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". True enough. Still, after all the blogs I have seen, the best bet for quality journalism is still the professionals. Simple reason, training. Know how. High consciousness of quality writing and other aspects of their work. VERY often amateurs are clueless in these areas, this is a fact of life. Yes, some amateurs rise to the level of professionals and some professionals are not all that good, several names come immediately to mind, but by and large where is there a comparison ? OK. Any start-up online news site will need amateurs. No way around it. And maybe it is for the good. But only if staff is carefully chosen. We aren't a news site, so there is a lot of latitude. The free speech group at U of O isn't a news service either, and almost any opinions get expressed, sometimes rather badly. But if the objective is creating a news site, what are the best alternatives ? This assumes a phantom non-budget to work with. The HPost at this time can think about serious money to use. A hypothetical RCPost would operate on pennies and good intentions for X months and maybe a year or more. I like her article. But in terms of the real world problem being posed it comes up short. Billy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- In a message dated 12/1/2009 3:26:44 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, [email protected] writes:
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/
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