Newsweek: Revenge of the Experts
March 8th, 2008 | by Brad King |The truly amazing thing about the Read/Write Web is that if you believe in the wisdom of crowds, and if you can harness that wisdom, the knowledge base you have is enormous.
What people are finding, though, is that when you turn on the fire hose, it’s hard not to get knocked over. This Newsweek piece examines companies that are turning to experts to copy edit and fact check user-generated sites in order to provide more authoritative information — hence, more sellable — to its users.
In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. “People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information,” says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a “perfect storm of demand for expert information.”
This gets to my fundamental point during my Journalism Next discussions, which is that journalists should be doing the work they do, not trying to learn how to use emerging technologies.
