Bloggers and Big Media

This round of the debate was introduced by a short but significant post on SacredFacts:

Enough of conferences going over the same ground, enough of bloggers (several of whom make their living from consulting with big organisations) saying big media doesn't "get it" and only they have insight, enough of big media publicly agonising over how to respond to the huge disruption the internet has brought. Enough of the fallacy of thinking there is some kind of power struggle going on. It's about integration, not subsititution...

For me this year has to be less about talking and more about doing.

That observation sparked considerable reaction in the blogosphere. (No subject animates bloggers more than talking about blogging, especially bloggers being dissed by MSM.) Brook himself links to many of them from within his rebuttal posts at SacredFacts; I especially recommend his short essay on the fallacy of us versus them.)

A couple of additional links and observations to share. Most surprisingly, perhaps, this from bête noire Craig Newmark (of craigslist):

"The Wisdom of Crowds sometimes leads to mob rule, panic, or bad decisions. We need ‘representative democracy’ on top of that. We need editors."

Newmark's quote and many others are highlighted at the official We Media conference blog here. (Do they take themselves serious, or what? Check out the lead on this one: "Rarely do you attend a conference where the accumulated intellectual star power on one stage is as great as was the case in our final group panel discussion at the We Media conference ...")

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 weighs in here.