Twilight of the info middlemen

From Rebecca MacKinnon:

In [Sunday's] New York Times, James Fallows has an article titled "Twilight of the info middlemen". As he introduces blogs to a readership not necessarily familiar with him, he writes:

"the Internet's most fascinating impact has been on those who have decided not to charge for their work."

Fallows grasps a key point about weblogs, one worth emphasizing as this medium grows more mainstream: blogging was born out of the desire for free expression and the desire to share one's self-expression freely and easily with others... not out of the desire for profit.


She also has this on Bill Moyers:

Bill Moyers is also a blog fan. At the very end of his recent Fresh Air interview on NPR he says:

"I think the internet, the blogging, is the closest we've come in a long time to the history of the American media in the beginning. You know in the 1820's, 1830's all you needed to be a journalist was to buy a press. That's why they called them inkstained wretches. Because they operated their own hand presses. For a little bit of money, like Tom Payne and others, you could have your own press. ....... After the revolution independent journalists, printers they called themselves, sprung up all over the country ... they were partisan by the way, vociferously. They attacked the others politics. but it was a healthy period of bombast in america in which people could sort out the information. I think the bloggers, then the websites, come closest to the spirit of cacophany, to that democratic expression, that we had in the early part of this country's history.