How many times have you heard pro journalists complain that all this UGC is just a lot of talentless, ill-informed bunk. That in the end, readers are going to return to professional publications because they will miss the quality.
But according to a recent Deloitte & Touche study, UGC isn’t going anywhere. Some 51 percent of the online audience is a UGC audience, and among younger users, the percentage is even higher. (It kind of makes you wonder why a UGC site would delete all of its UGC content, doesn’t it, especially under the premise of “it just isn’t working”?)
Meanwhile, there is a firehose of new content to keep up with every day, even if you just narrow your focus to a niche or two to follow.
Social aggregators like Digg help address the issue in the tech news world combining human intelligence computer power to filter content, but in the general news world, nothing like that has really worked yet.
And from the pro-journalist perspective, a high-falutin attitude would say, “I don’t want no dang bunch of amateurs filtering my news for me.”
So, if you believe that finding the best news reports on the web can be difficult and that trained, professional journalists have a role to play in helping people sort it all out, then Scott Karp’s new venture should interest you. You can read more about it here.
If you’re a pro journalist, go help out. This could get interesting.
to follow your fire hose analogy: water seeks its own level….
I’m very interested to see how things develop with Publish2 I wonder if it starts out as place for journalists (even broadly defined ones) what the appeal will be for folks outside to want to come inside.
Then there’s the social networking thing–can that aspect of the project work when there are so many darned social networks that we’re eventually going to need something like Meebo for all our social networks…
And then there’s the water/level thing. Online communities always “grow” but then they seem to top off–certain personalities become dominant, the communities take on characteristics that make them their own worst enemies (as Clay Shirky’s pointed out in a seminal essay on the topic.) We’ve yet to see digg, reddit, etc. reach those levels (although some are close) so I wonder if, by limiting the community, if those negative characteristics will appear sooner…
But I do wish Scott great luck with this. and it will be fun to be part of it, too.