Nicholas Carr: “Leave journalism to professionals!”

The author of the scandalous article “IT does not matter” (2003), as well as harsh criticism of the concept of Web 2.0 and the “worship cult”, Nicolas Carr, turned his attention to the media industry, including the recent trends in the spread of “civic” journalism, the emergence of UGC sites from journalistic content, competition of the blogosphere and traditional media, democratization of the media. As it is not difficult to guess, Nicholas Carr treats all this extremely negatively. Right during the MediaBistro conference, he gave a public interview to the editor of BusinessWeek magazine.



The main thesis of Carr is that the highest quality media content is created and will always be created only by professional journalists.



Contrary to expectations, Web 2.0 did not change anything in the sense of the monopoly of large media corporations. They dominate online in the same way as in print media. The most popular bloggers buy the same media corporations. So far, we see only the first such cases: the other day media empire Conde Nast announced the purchase of Ars Technica techno-blog; Also recently announced the purchase of CNet online media holding along with dozens of blogs that are part of it. In the near future a massive buying up of the most popular blogs is expected. In addition, commercially successful bloggers hire additional staff and themselves become more professional media.



Quality content is created by talented people. And the problem is that modern web technologies can interfere with them. First, democratic online “equalizes” rare professionals with a huge gray mass. All of them are published on a par with each other, which reduces the overall level of content. Secondly, the monetization of individual articles and the popularity of publications online do not always fairly reflect the importance and quality of these texts from the point of view of journalism. For example, an important article about the work of volunteers in Africa, by definition, will not bring so much money on contextual advertising, as a note, for example, about depression among office workers, which will collect a full set of expensive advertising from antidepressant manufacturers.

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Thus, over time, web journalism will turn into a “wrapper” for promoting the most profitable words from contextual advertising.



Discussing other examples of supposedly successful Web 2.0 projects, it’s about Wikipedia. Here Nicholas Carr said that this project will never be successful without coordination and leadership. And the more professional editors have been added to Wikipedia in recent years, the better the content has become. However, even now its quality is very low.



If you take open source, here crowdsourcing also has limited scope. For example, people may well catch bugs in very complex software. In Wikipedia, people also perform a very large amount of work on the summarization and structuring of content. But if we are talking about the finalization of the product - whether it is Wikipedia or Linux - without the help of professionals can not do.



Interestingly, an interview with Carr was made on the same day that a special channel for “civilian” journalists appeared on YouTube. As the spiteful critics can say, the dog barks and the caravan moves on. But where is he going?