We believed that having a core level of professional content –- from our site editors -– would be enough to attract a loyal following even if the user-submitted content wasn’t enough on its own. But I think we didn’t have nearly enough of that. If I had any money left to throw at the business, I’d hire more well-known athletes and adventurers, so that the core was a larger pool of professional content — and I’d mix that in with the best user content.
I’m not saying that user-submitted content isn’t worthwhile, let me be clear about that. I am saying that I think you can’t rely too much on it. And you need to filter out and highlight the best user content, while downplaying the visibility of the mediocre stuff.^
The publishing worlds are under assault from many fronts. People download MP3s, they trade eBooks, they blog and read the newspaper if they get to it. Does this mean that the conventional model of publishing is dead? Sort of, but not really. The real need out there is still for aggregators, whether sites like Digg or the hard-boiled editors of major papers, to filter through the massive flow of junk and pull out the gems, format them correctly, do background research and present it in a format that doesn’t waste the reader’s time.
I wonder how long it will take for the book publishing industry to see the same thing. Many of the books I’ve read of late have obvious “spellchecker errors” in them, such as homonyms inserted in the wrong places, as if editors are now trying to get more out the door in a shotgun approach. I’m also finding that my discards ratio has risen alarmingly. So many of these new books are promising until you dig into the guts, and then you realize, it’s a slightly novel way of telling a very predictable and not very realistic story. Too often, it’s comparable to reading a fanfic site but with better pretensions.
The peoplemedia revolution is important, but like all revolutions, it seems to me that it goes too far, and that then the cycle returns. Most blogs are garbage, including this one. Too many books means the gems get lost in the shuffle and we’re left with nothing we’ll remember for a generation. User-generated content is a great idea, if there’s an editor to filter it, which means that you’re approaching content from roughly the same model a newspaper does. Nothing ever really changes, but we try so hard to make it look like it’s so.