Regarding Dave Winer’s @davew@mastodon.social assertion that journalists should view people writing on the Internet as sources, rather than their competitors: I had this ongoing argument with a friend and colleague who was a very traditional journalist — he later went on to work for the New York Times and then Bloomberg. This was in the 2000s, when blogging was hot, and I was pro-blogging while he was a blogging skeptic.
I eventually stopped arguing with him when I realized that good-faith bloggers criticizing journalists were angry at journalists for not acting like journalists should. It’s fine for random people on the Internet to say random things, but journalists should be reporting what’s actually happening, not just repeating the random things that random people say on the Internet.
Dave also discusses WordPress’s potential as an infrastructure for the social web: “… underneath the cluttered user interface is a strong foundation that you could build any kind of writing software on.” The cluttered interface eventually drove me away from WordPress, and I now describe it as an Internet publishing and commerce platform that incidentally does a mediocre job of supporting blogging.