On the cover of his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen is described as a “digital media entrepreneur and Silicon Valley insider”. He sounds, though, like a very angry outsider.
The book is a polemic against Web 2.0 — that phase of the internet in which the audience, rather than just reading and watching and listening and downloading, is writing and filming and playing and uploading. The content receivers have become content providers. Or, as Keen puts it, “the monkeys are running the show”.
“When amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube or change an entry on Wikipedia,” the blurb on the back of the book says, “the distinction between expert and amateur becomes dangerously blurred. We are facing the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated.”
Keen is pretty loud and opinionated himself, and given to sweeping generalisations:

“Every new page on MySpace, every new blog post, every new YouTube video adds up to another potential source of advertising revenue lost to mainstream media.”
“Every defunct record label, or laid-off newspaper reporter, or bankrupt independent bookstore is a consequence of ‘free’ user-generated Internet content.”
“Every visit to Wikipedia’s free information hive means one less customer for a professionally researched and edited encyclopedia such as Britannica.”

But he’s still worth reading. Proponents of Web 2.0 talk of democratising the media and bringing more truth to more people. Hogwash, says Keen. His view is that, in our attempts to give everyone a voice, we are wrecking institutions that have served us well, from newspapers to the music industry to Hollywood, encouraging piracy and plagiarism, and building nothing but a digital Babel.
He is particularly dismissive of “citizen journalists” and a champion of the professionals, who, he says, “acquire their craft through education and through the firsthand experience of reporting and editing the news under the careful eye of other professionals”. Well, most of them do. On this side of the Atlantic, a sizeable number of those working for news organisations are really gentleman amateurs. There has long been a tradition of bringing bright young people straight out of Oxbridge and on to the diary desks and even into the leader conferences of national newspapers. Some swim, some drown, but even the swimmers will have had little training in the skills of even-handed reporting that are learnt in council chamber and courtroom. But then they’re not reporters, they’re commentators — and who’s to say they’re any better qualified in that role than Joe Blogger?
This time last year, Keen reports, NBC Universal was doing exactly the same as the BBC is doing right now — cutting costs and jobs. The company’s chairman, Bob Wright, told The Wall Street Journal then: “As we reprioritise ourselves towards digital, we’ve got to be as efficient in our current businesses as possible. We can’t have new digital expenses and the same analogue expenses.” There’s a sobering thought for those of us working in news organisations that are still — for the moment — publishing in print as well as on the web.