The Gotterdammerung-of-mainstream-media argument has a weak and a strong formulation. …

The strong version is most associated with Dave Winer, a grumpy California software programmer best known for helping to develop the Web-feed format RSS and for his blog, Scripting News. Winer has written, and not without glee, “Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists. … Everyone is now a journalist.”

If media companies can’t earn money, and everyone is a journalist, it follows that “amateurs” (Shirky) and “sources” (Winer) will be part of a “decentralized” media (Winer), whose stories will be distributed by “excitable 14-year-olds” (Shirky).

This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. True, the journalists who write about these matters for mainstream media often know as little; I didn’t understand much until I became the publisher of Technology Review as well as its editor in chief. But Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.

Winer’s been treated like an informed media expert for years, but his entire professional experience in journalism consists of writing commentary for Wired for one year back in the ’90s.

Pontin goes on to say on Twitter, when criticized over the piece, that “These people are, I think, insane. Filled with hostility, completely impractical, and, in the final analysis, dishonest.” Winer doesn’t know journalism, but at least one journalist knows him pretty well.

This thread, which was pointed out by a commenter on the last post is as perfect an example as there is.

A commenter by the name of Allan Donald read Dave’s post on rebooting journalism and pointed out a small caveat that Dave seems to be over-looking. He did it deferentially and respectfully.

The really interesting, actually valuable work newspapers (rarely, in their end times) did was to uncover the sources who didn’t want to talk, and to drill out the information that didn’t want to be free.

These people are never going to have blogs, or their blogs are only going to present a spun version of their truth. Who is going to force them to speak? The decentralised weight of thousands of bloggers?

And, of course, he’s right. Information that wants to get out will find a way to do so. It’s uncovering the “secret” information that makes reporters so useful. Dave, of course, doesn’t agree:

Did reporters really force their sources to speak? What form did this forcing take? Examples? Did they extort them in some way? What’s the source of this power?

This is a pretty classic Dave technique. Ask a lot of questions hoping that even one of the answers will be unacceptable. Problem is, Allan’s answers were pretty spot-on. At this point, Dave has an opportunity to interface with someone who clearly knows what he’s talking about and maybe refine some of the suck out of his idea. If you take him at his word, he likes to do this. Instead, we get this: “I don’t see why the power you’re talking about is limited to newspapers.”

Of course, Allan didn’t say that it was. In fact, he said the opposite: “There’s nothing inherent in printing on paper that means a online publication can’t one day replicate this authority+attention trick.”

Allan continued to press his point, but Dave had had enough:

Right. But blogs weren’t started “tomorrow” — that’s the whole point of the piece you’re commenting on.

No one that I know is “seeking to replace” newspapers. Your whole point of view is very weird, it’s as if you’re inventing something or someone to disagree with, and stating positions of no one that I know (I don’t think they actually exist) and then proving them wrong.

I think this thread is over. Thanks.

None of the points Dave made in that last comment are actually relevant. One of the main arguments I took away from Allan’s comments was that nobody seeking to replace newspapers is the problem — because right now bloggers don’t perform the same role that reporters do (or should). Allan’s point of view is “very weird” to Dave because it was something he hadn’t considered, but his blog is a perfect example of it.

If Dave were a reporter his local newspaper and wrote a long piece about the poor service of a local BMW Dealership, my guess is that he’d have gotten a hell of a lot stronger reaction than he did in his blog post on the same topic. Or think about all of the times Dave has told someone at a business “I’m a blogger” (which I still get a chuckle out of picturing) — really powerful stuff, right? No. Why not? For all the reasons Allan mentions.

It’s been said before, and its true: Dave knows of no problems for which he is not the solution.

Of course