En av flera reaktioner på Bill Thompsons artikel om Google, denna gång kritisk:
”the idea that the limit of this whole debate could be ’are weblogs going to replace journalism’ – well it pisses the crap out of me. Because while some journalists are sitting around complaining about about how you can’t trust anything you read unless it’s had an editor to correct the grammar, the actually interesting and significant debates are being totally ignored.
These are the debates about what effect an empowered and vocally reactive readership might have on journalism, or the debates about the implications of the huge traffic peaks that can happen when all of webloggia turns your way. These are the debates about how incredibly useful and important it would be to gauge statistically which news stories actually do matter to people, and what it means when hundreds of thousands of people decide to take the news they’ve been given and do something with it – push it further, do their own research – on occasion refusing or challenging the initial piece. How would that change the job of a journalist? What effect would that have, will that have, in two / five / twenty years?
/…/
The whole thing is based on a really simple misconception – they keep viewing each individual weblog as if it was competing with the New York Times. But instead of doing that, they should be looking at how hundreds of thousands of (proper media) readers have completely shifted from passive reception of news to repurposing it, commenting upon it and – on occasion – challenging it…”
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