Boy, did I get an ear full after that published. In fact, because of the student revolt I created on campus, I was relieved of my music review duties. The point of the story is that it's much easier to get away with writing dumb stuff when you're not directly accountable to your audience. Now, thanks to the maturing network, there's no longer anywhere to hide. According to Gillmor and others, new tools such as weblogs and moderated forums are moving journalism from lecture to conversation.
Writers have to deal with the nearly instantaneous feedback that their readers deliver.
My guess is that some journalists don't care for this change. The irony is, that people have always thought we were idiots when we wrote dumb things. The only difference is that now they can tell us. Derrick Story is the managing editor of the O'Reilly Network.