So I’m in a meeting with some Newsroom folks and all of Senior Management.

After most everybody laid out their views on where we should take our web strategy and what concerns they had about allowing user-generated content (their new buzzword) they turned to me and said “What do you think?”

I said, “I disagree with most of what has been said here, because it’s mostly based on the false premise that the Web is a publishing medium and it’s not.

(short pause for effect)

It’s a communications medium.”

Some polite nods followed and some quizzical looks.

I continued, “You are speaking as if we are some sort of gatekeepers, but that was only true because we owned a printing press. We controlled the distribution channel.

Now we are on a level playing field. So it’s meaningless when you tell a user that they can’t upload that photo. They don’t care. They’ve already got it up on Flickr. They were doing you a favor.”

Most likely very few people in the room knew what Flickr was, would never ask because of corporate posturing, and never felt compelled to find out later)

So then the discussion leader says, “I think we all on the same page.”

Oh really.

I don’t think so.

You think so because Corporate Central has mandated we embrace user-generated content. I know what that means, even if they don’t truly mean it. If you really want it to be a success, it better damn well mean what I take it to mean. It doesn’t.
What it means in your mind is that we allow others to publish moderated content on our site and play by our rules.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I don’t think that’s good enough.

Here is the bottom line:

The next generation of News websites that attempt user-generated content will initially attract some users but eventually fail to be compelling enough to retain them in an ever-growing sea of user-control and distribution commoditization.

Over-supply of journalism has been a concept traveling around the blogosphere of late. We certainly know we have an over-supply of information in general. That makes just about anything digital a commodity. And  a commodity is not something to build a business upon.

I’d like to say that relationships are not a commodity and that’s where we should head. It certainly seems where many startups and established players are with the whole social software movement. But relationships too may get commoditized if social networks become fluid and agile.

What can’t be commoditized? Creativity, perhaps. Perhaps not. I’ll guess we eventually land somewhere and just get compensated for our contribution and compensate others for theirs, with no intermediaries. But we have some time before then.

So back to the news.

Perhaps in the next iteration, the news organizations will finally wake up and realize the conversation is happening, and “user-generated content” is not a conversation because it literally bespeaks the fact you don’t consider the user an equal.

Let’s get rid of that buzzword. Let’s get rid of this condescension.

Let’s get it on. [disclosure: I am not Marvin Gaye]

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