Absolutist declarations of the form "______ is dead" are a cheap way to get links, and universally they are nonsense. Steve Boriss' declaration that "citizen journalism is dead" and "expert journalism is the future" is an example. He incorrectly cites Mark Potts' Backfence and Steve Outing's shutdown of the Enthusiast Group as examples.
Backfence and Enthusiast Group were both commercial failures for unrelated reasons. Backfence simply burned through its cash and ran into a host of internal issues that Potts has hinted at, but not discussed publicly; it was not a failure of the participative model in general. Enthusiast Group's big mistake, in my opinion, was selecting outdoor sports as its topical focus. I learned a long time ago that outdoor people are outdoors, not plopped in front of a computer, and relative to many other affinity groups it's not exactly loaded with commercial opportunity.
What's even more puzzling is lumping Enthusiast Group in with the very concept of "citizen journalism." Makes. No. Sense.
Boriss issues a criticism of citizen journalism that, if true, I would agree with:
"The problem with Citizen Journalism is that it tries to force news back to what it was. Actually, worse than it was. It takes the same stale, one-size-fits-all, center-left, authoritative-tone news model that news consumers are rejecting, then adds large quantities of material from unpaid amateurs who have no particular expertise in reporting, editing, writing, or their topic."
But that doesn't describe what either Backfence or Enthusiast Group was attempting to do, and it certainly isn't adequate to cover the very diverse landscape of emerging participative media, which generally is framed by forums and personal blogs at one end of the shelf, and OhMyNews at the other. That's quite a lot of territory. Applying arbitrary labels and issuing absolute dismissals doesn't advance our understanding.
Thanks to EditorsWeblog.org for the pointer.
Addendum: From the Pew Internet & American Life project comes this commentary, which points out that people often look to both experts and non-experts and make their own evaluations.