I've seen a bunch of links to this story about crowdsourcing journalism, from the Monday NYT. When I read it, sans coffee, my eyes rolled up so hard in my head I thought they were going to pop out and roll over the floor. Please. How's this:
The Web has transformed a lot of things, including journalism, turning it into a self-cleaning and occasionally overheated oven. Those of us who perpetrate journalism know in our hearts that it is a craft, not a profession, one that requires a finite set of skills to do competently and a lot of passion to do well.
This past season, I wrote a blog about the movie business that would flick at topics that I was either too uninformed about or too hard-pressed to nail down. Inevitably, readers would begin buzzing around in comments, a hive that sent out a swarm that eventually, through conversation, argument and annotation, yielded valuable insights and hard facts.
“We are not creating a robot that is some kind of journalism machine,” said Ms. Sandler, the editor of the project. “This is not a death knell or a new utopia.”
“It’s like throwing a party,” she added. You program the iPod, mix the punch and dim the lights and then at 8 o’clock people show up. And then who knows what is going to happen?”
Ooh! Oooh! I know! A lot of opinion and very little fact, just what we need. Honestly, I'm not always such a skeptic, but I read the breathless predictions like the above all the time. Seriously, a lot of it reminds me of the total apple pie-ness of this statement. Anytime something sounds too good to be true? Well...