Nicholas Carr, The writing is on the paywall:

It’s a fantasy to believe that the production of all the kinds of news that people value, particularly hard news, can be shifted over to amateurs or journeymen working for peanuts or some newfangled journo-syndicalist communes. Certainly, amateurs and volunteers can do some of the work that used to be done by professional journalists in professional organizations. Free-floating freelancers can also do some of the work. The journo-syndicalist communes will, I suppose, be able to do some of the work. And that’s all well and good. But they can’t do all of the work, and they certainly can’t do all of the most valuable work. The news business will remain a fundamentally commercial operation. Whatever the Internet dreamers might tell you, it ain’t going to a purely social production model.

I believe that people (non-commercial journalists) will have a role to play in producing and disseminating news, and I do believe that people are great filters of information. The social production model will play a large role in distributing and marketing news, but professional news sources and commercial journalists will still play an important role: to think that commercial news sources will not adapt is pretty short-sighted.

Most of the today’s technological and cultural changes impact how we distribute information and news (and perhaps that’s why we spend most of our time “talking about talking”). But the big question is how information and news will be created, and I would be surprised if professional, commercial news sources did not play a defining role in producing and filtering information. What are all the “citizen journalists” going to link to?

Continuing with Carr:

The newspaper industry is in the midst of a fundamental restructuring, and if you think that restructuring is over – that what we see today is the end state – you’re wrong. Markets for valuable goods do not stay disrupted. They evolve to a new and sustainable commercial state. Tomorrow’s reality will be different from today’s.

Perhaps; but instead of evolving towards a “sustainable” equilibrium, tomorrow’s reality might be more change.

Instead of trying to define a single answer, let’s start thinking about multiple models of information creation and dissemination to fit our variety of cultures, styles, methods, use cases and models of interaction.

But in any case, to think that today’s trends will continue in some straight-line, continuous path is a terribly misleading way to think about the world. To think that the rules of tomorrow are set today is incredibly short-sighted. Instead of focusing on what is, why can’t we think about what can be?

We’re living through an inflection point: for us, tomorrow is today. Let’s have fun with it.

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Yes, I know I said I would leave this topic to others. C’est la vie.

Credit for the title goes completely to Umair Haque…