Dean Starkman argues in the Columbia Journalism Review that they are, and that crowd-sourcing will never be journalism's salvation. "No reader — no community of readers — knew more about Standard Oil than Ida Tarbell," Starkman writes. Also: "Seeing news as a commodity, and a near valueless one ... is a fundamental conceptual error." Some of his targets respond in the comments. More from Ken Doctor and Emily Bell.
November 14, 2011