Amateur! Vs! Pro! Fight!

Prompted by the blogosphere's attacks on Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur, Wired's Tony Long acknowledges the role of the amateur, but argues they have nothing on professionals. He uses journalism as an example because it's the field he knows best.

But opportunity and desire alone do not professional historians or journalists or pundits make. There's this process known as "learning your craft" and "paying your dues" that all professionals must endure. Sorry, but trolling the web and blogging from your darkened study doesn't qualify as on-the-job training.

Though I didn't go to journalism school, I draw a sharp line between my professional writing and my blogging, and it comes down to research. (When friends introduce me as a blogger, I'll instantly pipe up with "and a freelance writer" to connote that I'm a professonal.) For even my shortest published pieces, I talk to at least 3 or 4 sources. For my blog posts, I speak to none: I use my own knowledge, my reference library, and Wikipedia. What writing skills I possess at this point come from a concerted, two-year-long effort to improve my writing, including paying attention to what my professional editors do to my text.

His article reminds me of a joke Ann Patchett likes to tell. She was at a party, and a doctor there said, "Oh, you're a writer. I've started writing as well. I set aside Friday nights for writing." To which Patchett replied, "Really, what a coincidence. I've started doing brain surgery on Thursday nights." Opportunity and desire don't make writers, either.

I'm sure Long will get ripped by the vitriolic bloggers, but I think he has a point. Professionals aren't perfect, as he says, but they have the training to go deeper on a subject and add value, while most bloggers—and by extension the rest of the Web 2.0 crowd—don't.

Another good quote:

What about the person who is "there"? What if you're standing on the steps of the Capitol, with your cell-phone camera, when Sen. Johnny Walker, three sheets to the wind, pitches head first down the marble stairs and breaks his neck? Your grainy, low-res photo makes it onto the nightly news and the front page of The New York Times. You even lean over to hear him say, with his dying breath, "Rosebud." Are you a reporter? A photojournalist?


No, you're an eyewitness who happened to be toting a camera. The eyewitness has been around for years, far longer than the cell-phone camera or the internet. Your contribution to the resulting news story may be enormous but you're not a reporter, anymore than someone applying first aid at an accident scene is a doctor. You're a source, someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time.