Knocking the gatekeepers off their perch

Steve Yelvington: Mark Cuban, the entrepreneurial billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a provocative take on the battle between bloggers and mainstream media in a post-gatekeeping world. Excerpt:

I don’t know the number of political bloggers, or the number of pages posted, but I can tell you this, every single one of them with any aspirations of popularity is looking for a way to stand out. The way that happens is to knock one of the gatekeepers off their perch.

Whether it’s been newspapers, magazines, TV or radio, the opportunities to reach an audience has been limited to a finite number of local and national gatekeepers. ...

Its payback time . The bloggers are here, and they are ready to knock down the gates and get their pound of flesh. The traditional media has no idea what is about to hit them.

In every major conference, at every major speech, sitting at tables in restaurants, there is going to be a blogger or podcaster with microphone, PDA, Videophone, laptop or paper and pencil in hand. Listening. Taking notes. That information is going to be transmitted to and from a blog entry and placed in the hands of “the readers”. ...

All true. It appears that knocking the pros off their pedestals will be a goal of some members of the citizens media movement for years to come. Kill the media!

OK, fine, get it out of your system.

Personally, I believe that we'll get past that and begin to concentrate on what's really important: creating our own stuff without the intermediation of the pros and the elites.