There are a number of things wrong with the Newsweek article titled: "Revenge of the Experts" - but it provides a really useful lens to look at the changes taking place in both Content and Search on the web.



Perhaps most importantly, I agree with Tony Dokoupil's thesis, but strongly disagree with his conclusion.  One of the things that traditional media has done is suggest to readers that the "Brand" is the expert.   That Newsweek, or CBS  or USA Today has created a series of filters and review processes that make their output more accurate and authoritative than the rising tide of bloggers, websites,  and community curated sources (Wikipedia, Digg,  Magnify, etc).

So, let's explore this - the author of this piece is Tony Dokoupil, whose credits I was not familiar with.  So I did a quick review of his past few articles to see if I deemed his world view on the web credible.  Here's what I found:


So, needless to say - if Tony is deep on web trends and technology, it doesn't show in his reporting.

Conversely, Steven Levy -  a tech reporter from Newsweek whose work I read and respect -  wrote:  "Invasion of the Web Amateurs"

Writing about the anti-amateur rabble rouser,  Andrew Keen,  Levy writes:

"I certainly agree (with Keen) that the survival of professional journalists is essential, both to society and to my mortgage payments... If we are to lose the beneficial halo generated by professionals, experts and geniuses, it won't be because of ankle-biting bloggers, callow Wikipedia authors and mediocre folk singers riding the long tail. It will be because the audience at large thinks that the truly good stuff isn't worth paying for. If all goes well, new business models will make it easier for excellence to be rewarded. In any case, we will ultimately get the media that we deserve."

Ah... wonderful.   Smart, honest,  self-depreciating… and insightful.  But Levy works the web media beat.  He knows the space.  He's engaged.

Most mainstream media co's have a handful of brand name 'starts' that they move from beat to beat.  Network TV News is the worst offender here - moving a 'health' expert to the 'money'  beat and then to 'family' without a second thought.  Tony Dokoupil's piece is exhibit 'a' here.  First, he interviews Andrew Keen. The dog eared rolodex for 'anti-amateur web’ quote monkey is evident here.  Then, he shifts to Jason Calacanis whose Mahlo uses real people to pick out web pages. And Jason has been on something of a Jihad against community curation going back to his decision to take on Digg while at Netscape, and his paid blogging network that he built and sold to AOL. What is missed here is that Jason too is using amateurs to choose his pages - just paid amateurs rather than unpaid amateurs.

What is worth noting - and where Tony misses the point - is that the web is ideally suited to embrace and build traffic around experts... they just don't need the infrastructure and overhead of mainstream media organizations to do it.

Take Gary Vaynerchuk  at Wine Library TV.   He's an expert - for sure.   He knows wine.  He loves wine.  He teaches wine.  Every day he's at it,  and he's got more than 80,000 viewers a day to prove it.  One guy,  on the screen - doing what he loves.  If his cell phone rings, he answers it - right on camera.

Why is Gary Vaynerchuck giving Wine Spectator a run for their money?

Because, authenticity and expertise beats brands and unbranded (and often unknown)  writers.

So,  the thesis - that Experts are coming online - is spot on.  What is wrong is that experts need to be housed in media companies, or need to have the overhead (and the controls) of  old media distribution to be credible.  He's got that upside down.

Then there's the issue of information overload. Here too, he's right.  There's far too much content on the web to consume it all.  Which is why users need to narrow their field of vision.  But having discovered this phenomenon (the web's got too much for any one person to manage) he draws an old media conclusion.

Will users be racing back to established media co's to manage information overload?  Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google)  addressed this while on a panel about the Future of News being taped for the BBC last week at the TED conference in Monterey.  What sources did Brin use to get his news?  "I used to use Google News, but now I've shifted to Google Reader" said Brin.  And of course that's the right answer, you don't expect blogging or any of the emerging forms of content creation and aggregation to slow down, you just embrace new filters and new methods of managing trust to sort through the rich new stew of ideas and information and opinion to gather together content that you seek.  Carl Burnstein, also on the panel,  argued for a return to the good old days  of  "news organizations that told you what you need to know."  Ugh.  Carl - how did you become old?  To see a feisty journalist flacking for the media mainstream was too much to bear.  I went home and watched "All the Presidents Men" just to clear my palette.

So, to recap.

Tony is not an expert.
Gary Vaynerchuk  is.
Sergey is right to believe that more content is always better than less.
Andrew Keen is the single charter member of the loyal opposition.
Newsweek should let Levy cover the web.

No doubt filters are important.  Sequoia is right to be looking that way.  But Jason is wrong to think that he's the filter - a room full of low paid knowledge workers is going to be beaten by Wikipedia every day of the week.

The crowds are wise.  But communities are wiser.  Stay tuned.