Back in the early days of the Blogosphere, Cathy Seipp looked at some of the inspired amateurs who were first beginning to make traditional members of the media squirm:
“The long-term question is, will big media become fragmented and collapse so that blogging becomes a real alternative?” Kaus asks. “Clearly, there’s no reason it has to be done by professionals. Will newspapers go out of business except for a few big ones and the rest of the business be left to amateurs?”
Reynolds thinks this is at least possible. “There are a lot of people who don’t have the designated credentials who are in fact better than some of the fossils you see on the op-ed pages of major papers,” he says. “I was on a talk show with Fred Barnes, [executive] editor of The Weekly Standard, and he said to me, ‘You’ve laid bare our dirty little secret. It’s not that hard.’ ”
The BBC, however, may be carrying things a little too far in their support of this spirit…
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