We Are All Anchormen Now

Julian Sanchez has a smart post on Palin-mania and the blogs aping the MSM:

We like to say new media is allowing us all to be journalists. But it’s probably more accurate to say it lets us all be anchors. Sure, the Internet also allows people with local knowledge or serious expertise to speak directly and be picked up by a wider audience, but it doesn’t fundamentally do a whole lot to increase the population of those people. But it radically expands the population of potential anchors chasing themor, increasingly, chasing each other. And we don’t even have the benefit of a script written by someone who at least got briefed by someone who knows something. So while on the one hand there’s a well-recognized trend toward media fragmentation into deep niches, there’s countervailing pressure toward convergence on a handful of big shallow water-cooler stories.