Andrew Keen is the author of a book with this title:
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, and the Digital World are Assaulting our Economy, Culture and Values
In a Word Press Freedom Day Debate he maintained that new media is killing journalism, a line that didn’t win according to Andrew himself. Journalism.co.uk, who are responsible for the overly aggressive headline of this story, has got a report up, where this quote stands out:
“It is no coincidence that just as you have the rise of The Huffington Post that encourages people to give away their content for free you have job losses and the death of the professional journalist.”
Read the full piece, and then check out Andrew’s piece in The Guardian, heralding lovely things like this:
The truth is that today’s internet – with its radical challenge to the traditional authority of elitist journalism – is as much a consequence of these socio-cultural changes than a cause of them. Today’s Web 2.0 media is just technology. We bring it to life. When we go online, we are staring into a ubiquitous mirror. New media is us, our collective narcissism, our aggregated hubris. So rather than accusing digital technology of killing journalism, we are the criminals here. It’s our use of democratising internet technology – our cult of the amateur, our cult of authenticity, our cult of ourselves – which is undermining the authority of professional public reporters.
What do you think? Are we killing journalism here?
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