Gillmor on "We Media"

Dan Gillmor on a subject the online journalism community loves to chatter about almost more than any other: collaboration with the audience. It takes many forms: from the hysteria over weblogs to the obsession with some naive concept of "community". Gillmor is using the phrase "We Media": "Journalism is evolving away from its lecture mode -- here's the news, and you buy it or you don't -- to include a conversation ... our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don't have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves." Gillmor is right of course, and transparency is hardly a bad thing, but hoping for an information democracy is fanciful. Self-selecting communities -- consisting of the bolshiest, best resourced chunks of a potential audience -- are hardly authoritative by definition.
(From Columbia Journalism Review)