Everyone is a media outlet

“Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.”

In the beginning of this article, Shirky argues that mainstream news media completely missed the advent of the Internet. Instead of worrying about how the Internet could take over ad revenue through websites such as eBay and Craigslist, mainstream news media worried about competition from other mainstream news media outlets. Shirky also argues that mainstream news media were too slow to react to the Internet.

“Even as web sites like eBay and Craigslist were siphoning off the ad revenues that keep newspapers viable – job listings, classified ads, real estate – and weblogs were letting people like gnarlykitty publish to the world for free, the executives of the world’s newspapers were slow to understand the change, and even slower to react.”

Shirky is quite right about this. In the past five or six years, mainstream news media has taken a giant leap by realizing the potential of the Internet. News outlets such as CNN, CBC, The Guardian, etc. have all taken to the Internet and attracted many readers.

Because of the Internet and it’s accessibility to citizens, the news is becoming amateurized. Online, webloggers are considered journalists as they publish their own work and control their own means of production. Creating blog posts such as this one, is easy to do and I control my own means of production. Therefore, making me a journalist.

Now, everyone is a journalist. Everyone can publish their own work online. However, only a few have journalistic privilege – and they are professionals.

Finally, Shirky argues:

“The spread of literacy after the invention of movable type ensured not the success of the scribal profession but its end. Instead of mass professionalization, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurization.”

I wholly agree with this point and it is obvious from surfing the Internet, and the millions of blogs reporting the same news. Whether the publishers are professionals or amateurs, the news is now everywhere and everyone is coming. Everyone has something to say and the Internet is a great way to get the word out.