I hope you don't mean me! I don't recall anyone doing any sniffing, but the comments I made during the day's final panel were not about RSS, which is a perfectly respected, if somewhat simpleminded and non-scalable, syndication tool. It's not the transport technology that's the issue, but the quality of the content moving across it, that I sometimes have issues with.
 

I hope you don't mean me! I don't recall anyone doing any sniffing, but the comments I made during the day's final panel were not about RSS, which is a perfectly respected, if somewhat simpleminded and non-scalable, syndication tool. It's not the transport technology that's the issue, but the quality of the content moving across it, that I sometimes have issues with.

Ken Ficara
 

Ken,

Thanks very much for your comment. I hear you on "bloggers" as a serious news source versus the RSS transport medium, yet that distinction between medium and message seems to mask a lack of desire to expose mainstream journalism to one-on-one competition within the medium. With proper technology management there's no reason why DJN or other major outlets should not consider this as a distribution medium for articles. At the same time, weblogging does challenge journalists to consider this not just as a distribution medium but as a new layer of journalism that seems to be creating content value outside of both the traditional model and the vastly overhyped gurus of weblogging. See my comments in a later entry along these lines. Journalists and news organizations would do themselves a large favor by spending less time shooting down the hype of weblogs and more time considering how they can be used to transform a largely stagnant news industry model that is facing enormous challenges. Such a re-evaluation need not displace traditional journalism values, but given the nature of weblogs those values need to be resituated in the new landscape of news with more careful thought.