I read last night that Scott Karp received US$2.75M funding for his company Publish2, which is described as

An online news aggregation platform, designed to empower journalists to discover, organize, and rank the most important news — to benefit their own reporting, their newsrooms, and all news consumers on the web.

I like Scott’s thoughts on media and hats off to him that he’s done more than just dwell on ways the media landscape is changing, but taken those ideas and is doing something with them.

From what I’ve read Publish2 is a tool for “professional” journalists and I was intrigued to read this on the Publish2 website, describing how it works as a news aggregator:

The emphasis, by the way, is actually theirs. Things is, I have a couple of problems with a few of the concepts behind Publish2 and admittedly it is only from my limited understanding about what they are trying to do:

1. If news organisations are using it as a guide to rank importance and emphasis on a story or even do research it is just further diluting the different perspectives/voices or alternate concerns of a particular issue. If information is “easily accessible” then it’s just likely to be rehashed. If wrong information is easily accessible, it just becomes an accepted truth.

2. The point about “taking back control” is SO problematic – in fact, there’s a little WTF? that goes off in my head every time I read that sentence. So journalists set up their own “digg” to decide what’s important – so what? What does that add to anyone outside of being a journalist and then again – so what? Unless journalism has been about writing stories for other journalists and I’ve missed something, then again – so what? Isn’t it much better that journalists understand what is important to their AUDIENCE – the amateurs.

The pressure on journalists to be better at their job is greater than it’s ever been before, but the key to improving the media landscape is not to add to the false kingdom of journalism, but for journalists to go and and get dirty with the amateurs. Publish2 sounds like it’s just adding to “professional” media’s problems.