The new mantra is that journalists will not in the digital age be gatekeepers --- they'll be curators. In essence they'll pull together an exhibit of the best content and ensure it's most relevant in presentation.
Andrew Keen, journalist and author of The Cult of the Amateur, writes in defence of gatekeeping in The Daily Telegraph. He suggests the thrust of relevance --- of relevant-focused curation --- is a dumbing-down of content to its most banal level.
Indeed, the gatekeepered model is costly. Keen notes that it's that commitment we should defend.
The notion "that the newspaper industry spews out popular garbage because of their greedy mogul owners is ludicruously wrong. If anything, the problem with the mainstream media and its supposedly monopolistic “gatekeepers” is quite the reverse. In their commitment to high quality content authored by professional (ie: paid) reporters and columnists, newspaper publishers are compromising their bottom line rather than the quality of their product."
If not gatekeepered, then what? Keen believes it will be the death of quality.
