Remember: journalism ain’t publishing

In the comments on this Buzzmachine post, Dave Winer, author of Scripting News, asks: “Who says that blogging is going to overthrow journalism?”

Certainly not I, Dave. Does anyone think there won’t a healthy trade done in reporting on information of public interest for, at least, the next millennium?

What I can say is that blogging will overthrow/surpass traditional publishing — with its first, second and third generation owners, title-encrusted executives, executive saunas, multiple layers of bureacracy, ombudsmanists, ad reps, ad rep Porsches…

The organizing principle and profit engine of newspaper publishing for the last 350 years has been control of distribution.

Moore’s law has liquidated that control. All sorts of technology — cheap servers, cheap bandwidth, cheap blog CMS, Google, ubiquitous devices for online reading, cyclonic blog networks — combine to collapse publishing’s fundemental barrier to entry. (As Jeff puts, the gatekeeper is dead.)

There’s only one barrier remaining — a machine can’t be funny or eloquent or cutting or wise. Moore’s law gives us a glut of bandwidth and CPUs but not creativity. Which means authors are the last remaining publishing players with any pricing leverage.

In fact, Dave, nobody should think that “journalism” is going to be overthrown by blogs. Quite the contrary: journalism is the only part of today’s media economy that will thrive.