Experts? Who cares!
I'll have an opinion please

Very brief comment reflecting on an article today from John Hartigan, CEO of News Ltd (and, in my opinion, usually a pretty sensible and reasonable guy). I'm not the only one a bit annoyed by this.

The particularly relevant piece in here is:

His most scathing attack was reserved for bloggers, who, he said, lacked resources and
access to key decision-makers.

"In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we've paid for - something of
such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance," he said.

He said blogs often gave a platform for "radical sweeping statements
unsubstantiated with evidence".

Ok, I'm not the only one annoyed by this. Two pieces of hypocrisy or contradiction come to mind. Firstly, Murdoch himself - who clearly gets the rise of social media and understand that UGC and peer comment and community are key to this. Secondly, News launch last month of The Punch (a news commentary website, did I hear someone mention blogging???).

But, the main point I want to raise came out of a conference i was speaking at yesterday. (The Australia Council for the Arts Marketing Summit 2009 for those of you wondering what the Twittering about #ozco was all about). Sturat Buchanan from Community Engine offered these three stats when talking about community as a place where we go for the real information. These are based on online social users, which, according to stats, equates to 99% of the 16 - 30 age demographic (a pretty key target group I'd say:

• They are three times more influenced by their peers than by formal commentators (including critics, journalists and other paid professionals)
• They are 85.9% more like to trust their peer reviews (community) over a critics comment
• (best for last) They are 84% more likely to trust any user review over that from a critic

It might be a hard message, but Hartigan needs to come to terms with the fact that, according to Gen C, News (professional, paid) comment is less trusted than that of almost anyone else.

I'll finish by pointing out what I think the real issue here is:

"We from this day own our own material and are going to go about getting it to the
masses through our own sources without going through businesses like Google."

So rather than us unresourced radicals with limited intellectual value, I have a feeling it is the 500lb gorilla that really has the heritage news community worried!