It’s the control over the distribution of the writing.

Scott Rosenberg, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads, has more today on the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

The audio from the meetup can be heard via Andrew Keen’s AfterTV podcast (thanks to Sabine for the heads up via a Comment). It is a little over an hour’s worth of mostly interesting conversation, and if you doubt that Steve Gillmor has the best handle on the blogosphere, one listen will erase any doubt. He is one smart, to the point dude. My Gillmor Gang envy keeps on growing.

Anyway, Scott is responding to a post by long-time blogger Rebecca Blood in response to Scott’s initial report from the Berkeley meetup.

Rebecca’s Take

Rebecca’s point is that traditional publishing is about printing books and articles they can sell, which has little to do with finding the most well written material:

When publishers evaluate a book proposal, they don’t ask if the work is true or original or insightful or well-written. First and foremost, they ask themselves if they can sell it. If they don’t think they can, they pass. If they believe there is a market and that they can effectively market the work, they buy it.

Scott’s Take

Scott mostly agrees with Rebecca, but draws a distinction between the business side of publishing and the editorial side:

Most editors wouldn’t be so imprudent as to claim that they are publishing “the best” anything; usually, they’ll talk about trying to publish “the best” that they can find for their particular readers. The most effective editors have an accurate sense of who those readers are and what they want.

My Take

First of all, as someone who has written a ton of newspaper and trade journal articles, my experience has been that most editors are looking for something interesting to publish, period. Perhaps this isn’t the case at the New York Times and its ilk, but most publications are hungry for stuff to publish. Whether they will admit that or not is another story, but it’s true.

Initially, there is a process that is at least somewhat designed to locate (a) something well written that (b) fits the focus of the publication.

Veteran writers know the focus of the publications they write for and can generally hit the nail on the head focus-wise on the first try. If you’re an unknown, the bar is higher and the writing must be more compelling to pass muster. If you are a recognized name or authority, the bar gets lowered a little. Perhaps a little ironic, perhaps not. But true.

I’m no John Markoff (and far, far from it), but when I write an article, I have little to no doubt I can get it published by one publication or another. More times than not, it’s the first one I offer it to.

The first couple of articles are sort of tough, but after you’ve been doing it a while, you realize it’s just not that hard to get publications to use your stuff.

Granted, I am not writing to make a living (it’s more of a marketing thing for me), but I have been doing it for a long time and I have to believe my experience mirrors that of many others.

But It’s Not About the Writing

My bottom line on all of this, however, is that everyone has it a little wrong. We’ve been talking about the right things, but not from the correct angle.

Old media is not in crisis because we are writing our blogs. Old media is in crisis because of a two step process is taking away its stranglehold on the distribution of writing. The easy analogy is the record labels and the way they grasp at the catless bag in the face of new distribution channels for music that bypass the labels. Like traditional newspapers, the record labels are in the twilight of their relevance.

So back to the newspapers.

First eBay and Craigslist take away a chunk of the beloved classified ads and that long-standing revenue stream.

Now bloggers (which include not only morons like us, but also geniuses like Andrew Keen) are chipping away at the content distribution model. There is a lessening of the need for a middleman to direct content to us. We can produce, publish, find, read and reply to it ourselves.

And this trend is in its infancy. It will continue and, if the traditional newspapers don’t adapt, it will make them economically infeasible. That’s part of the basis of my 8 Steps to Save the Merc post.

So it’s not about the writing, and it’s not about the quality of the writing. It’s about the loss of control of the distribution of the writing.

If there was any hope that Andrew Keen was only kidding a few weeks ago when he laid this nugget on us:

If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural ‘flattening.’,

such hope was crushed by Keen’s statements at the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

Christopher Carfi posts a report from that gathering that makes it clear that Keen is still preaching that blogging allows idiots too much of the soapbox that should be reserved for the old media elite.

If I’d been there and managed not to hurl all over my laptop, I would have raised my hand and asked him two questions:

(a) Who decides who is elite? Is merely a press pass from a newspaper evidence of elite status or is there more to it?

(b) Are you one of the elite? If so, who anointed you such? And if not, aren’t you adding to the problem by having a blog?

The first thing I ask myself when someone tries to create a line of demarcation (elite, non-elite, etc.) is “who decides where the line goes” and “who decides who decides where the line goes.” Those two questions will help you cut through more bullshit than any other questions you could ask.

Scott Rosenberg has a report on the CyberSalon as well, which contains some past and present Keen quotes:

The purpose of our media and culture industries is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.

What is the value in sharing experiences? I grow weary of your scribblings.

Clearly this guy is either the most arrogant person to ever poke at a keyboard or he’s found an angle and is going to ride it as far as it will take him. I don’t know him, but he certainly seems to have come upon a recipe of arrogance, big fancy words and outlandish statements that gets him a lot of attention.

My grandmother used to tell me that arrogance was a distraction to mask insecurity, but she wasn’t part of the elite media, so what did she know.

Scott sums up the recent non-conversation very well:

To Keen, that sort of talk is part of a “cult of creative self-realization.” “The purpose of our media and culture industries,” he writes, “is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent”; blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: “The cream also rises in the blogosphere.”

In the interest of cooking the whole pancake, let me say that I agree with some of what Andrew says on his blog, particularly the Web 2.0 stuff. He has this need to make sure you know how smart he thinks he is, but once you filter out the extra noise, a lot of what he says is spot on. And, perhaps intentionally and perhaps not, he can be very funny (as in his MySpace take).

But he’s completely off base on the whole elite media business.

Oddly enough, my hunch is that he knows it.