The new media regime: mainstream vs. citizen

I was thinking abouyt an earlier blog post in which I said that although I fully support participatory journalism, I'm tragically not in favor of issuing press passes or credentials to citizen journalists. At least not yet.

An analogy I just thought of was the regulation Google uses between the sites, services and sources it lists and indexed within Google News and the new Google Blog Search. The former is very meticulous (or used to be anyway) in selecting resources to list and crawl, being only formal, legitimate news organizations. Obviously, the latter applies to the general blogosphere. A nice system of reliable control is therefore maintained, in being able to provide a very distinct separation between what's coming out of the mainstream and the word on the street. You might disagree, but I prefer this method.

I really am loving the fact that "the media" is no longer a separate entity from the general population, and further like how it's been delineated to what's mainstream and what's citizen-based.

As an interesting corollary, Steve Outing wonders whether MSM should train PJ. I thought that freedom to express onesself through open distribution channels was the point.