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Mathew - thanks so much for including my questions. My immediate thought while reading Keen's response was "old thinking." It's fine if you desire filters.
I love HBO for instance because they produce high quality programs (is it Sunday and time for Sopranos yet?), but I'm not opposed to watching videos on youtube. I read ABC's The Note every morning, but I'm not opposed to taking in viewpoints from a wide variety of bloggers and journalists across the web.
The great thing about the web and blogosphere is that I get to decide, I set the filters.
This is like some sort of epic battle of strawmen.
I'd actually give Keen the edge here, but he's too interested in being "controversial". Here's the real answers:
1) "Who gets to be the arbiter ..."
Look, if you think there's NO DIFFERENCE between "quality" and "popular" - that BY DEFINITION, "best" == "most appealing" - then there's nothing to say. If you don't, well, you've answered your own question in a way.
2) "do you enjoy a little more variety ..."
Strawman. The question is "Do you want the gatekeepers to be professional culturalists or professional demagogues? Because there *will* be a small set of gatekeepers, and it's just a matter of which ones.
Oh, why bother :-(.
As a professional journalist, Mathew, I'd like to know what you think about a future society void of professional journalists? Surely, there is a notable distinction between _trained_ writers and _hobyist_ bloggers? Seperating this wheat from the chaff is exactly what we're talking about here. Traditional newspapers give me an easy way to do that. Technorati does not; their metrics are worthless for determining quality, since the irreducible unit of their algorithms is the hyperlink, a meaningless measure even when (or maybe especially when) taken in aggregate.
I've been thinking about this a lot for some months, as I've long considered making a career or writing and/or journalism but have little faith in the professional's ability to make a living in this regard. The signal to noise ratio is just so low, and I don't see it improving.
Perhaps you have some thoughts that might make me reconsider my somewhat-sypathetic view of Andrew's thesis?
And Mat, I am a big fan of high-quality writing and high-quality thought -- but I'm at least willing to admit that it can be found in other places than just newspapers and magazines.
And unlike Andrew, I don't see it as being a binary question -- either we have trained journalists or a sea of hobbyist bloggers. I think one can complement the other.
From a purely financial point of view, I really don't think Adwords is a viable model, but I'm talking being stricly dollars and sense. What about the infrastructure (human, technological, and other) that large media companies can provide to support the professional journalist and help him/her thrive? Wither the media organization, and you lose more than just a handful of pros - you lose the very machines that have learned what quality means (or so I think they've learned from what I see of your employer Mathew)
http://bokardo.com/archives/its-just-people-tal...
a Douglas Adams (of Hitchhikers Guide fame) quote:
“Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.”