Below is an excerpt of an interview with Andrew Keen. This particular passage, I feel, is more or less right on the money, philosophically and practically.

Enjoy,
D.

CBC RADIO SUNDAY EDITION
News 2.0
Transcript: Andrew Keen’s views about ‘News 2.0′

B: I’d like to talk to you about the assault on mainstream media and this idea of “citizen journalism.” I assume this is a term you do not particularly want to embrace.

AK: Citizen Journalism, no, it’s not my favourite phrase, just as I ‘m not keen on a phrase like citizen pilot or citizen chef or citizen politician. When I flew out to Canada today, I got on the plane and the pilot didn’t get on the phone and say I’m volunteering today, I’m an enthusiast at flying the plane, so I just thought I would help you out; I’m doing it for free.

The notion of citizenship is something which I think has been profoundly misunderstood and abused by the web 2.0 crowd. Good citizens, the purpose of, the purpose of media for a good citizen is to understand the world, to digest information so that they can understand the world and act upon it. That’s the nature of our representative democracy. Information then, the value of a journalist, a professional journalist is to provide the citizen with that information, to understand the world, to vote, to determine the qualities of ones own government and ones own role in the world.

Citizenship and journalism don’t go together. A good journalist is not necessarily a good citizen. A good journalist, a brilliant journalist like a Robert Fisk in England or a Thomas Freedman in America is not necessarily a good citizen. They don’t have to vote. They could be a fascist for all we know, entirely indifferent to politics, but that doesn’t undermine the quality of their journalism, their experience, their professionalism, the quality of their writing.

Citizenship and journalism have nothing to do with one another and when you bring them together, it’s very dangerous because what you’re saying is anyone who wants to improve the world should go out and report it so virtue then replaces professionalism. Good intention makes one a good journalist and that results in incompetence.

I don’t have a problem with democratizing the media, provided that there are editors and competent people involved in the process. My problem with the blogosphere and with the web 2.0 revolution is the idealization of amateurs, the innocent, the old sort of Rousseau notion that the child knows more than the adult so I’m all in favour of new more irreverent magazines or online periodicals coming along and challenging conventional wisdom.

I think Joshua Marshall on the blogosphere is a good example of a very high quality, smart, professional journalist that’s doing an excellent job. I think that Arianna Huffington is another good example of someone who has something interesting to say, although she could just as easily write in mainstream media. So I don’t have a problem with start up media organizations.

I think the great benefit of web 2.0 is that the media revolution has given mainstream media a good kick in the pants. The problem is, when that kick in the pants becomes a kick in the crotch and you kill the thing. The other problem, and this is my fundamental critique of the web 2.0 idealogs is the vast majority of new voices on the internet are not earning an income, which means they can only do it part time, which means that the quality of their work, whatever their talent is going to be inferior to the person who is employed full time.

The problem with the shift from traditional newspapers to the blogosphere is the blogosphere is not a viable, economic platform to support full time journalists. Ultimately in the long run, we are going to become a nation of Huffington Post opinionators. We are going to become a nation in which we are getting a lot of opinions, a lot of peoples views, and fewer facts because more and more newspapers are closing down or forced to shut foreign bureaus.

The ironic consequence of this so called global village is actually more and more localization, more and more parochial media and more and more of the internet as a kind of echo chamber where people go on it to listen to exactly what they want. It’s less open, less global.

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