Outstanding post yesterday by Ann Handley on her Annarchy personal blog. I enjoyed it because she talks about two things near and dear to me: New Media and community theater. To be honest, I hadn't really thought about the parallels Ann describes, but I think she's right. Social publishing tools have made it much easier for anyone to publish their opinions. In the same way, community theater provides an outlet for non-professionals to express themselves as actors and technicians. As Ann says in her post:

Folks who previously didn’t have voice—or, more specifically, a platform—now do. In other words, like the community theater players, all kinds of people have a stage, if they want one. The “unbundling of all sources,” as Dave [Winer] calls it, has given voice to lots of folks previously shut out of the conversation.

and

Those who do climb up on the stage reveal themselves at a more fundamental level. Just like my acquaintance who risked showing a sassier, freer, funner side… bloggers can’t help but reveal themselves to their audiences.... Blogs are honest in a way that professionals aren’t.

Great stuff. Ann also discusses the ever-present professional versus amateur argument regarding social media. It's also present in theater, with a definite disdain by many professional theater artists toward their community theater brethren.

The point isn't replacing professionals with amateurs (although there are those on the amateur side who would perversely rejoice in the fall of professional media - or theater - despite the unlikelihood of that actually happening). The point is creating opportunities for those who don't otherwise have a voice to make themselves heard. And letting that person you "sort of know" from your community express herself on-stage for the first time.

Revisiting a topic I covered last week, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania released an excellent article yesterday on "The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media" on their Knowledge@Wharton web site. A few insights from the article:

Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader and Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach say fears about user-generated content are misplaced. "It's absurd to say the pendulum is swinging back to professional content. User-generated content has just been born," says Fader. There is little evidence to suggest that it takes market share from the professional variety, he adds.

and

The mergers between traditional media companies and user-generated sites are indications of where Internet content is headed, say experts at Wharton. Despite hand wringing over professional and amateur content, the reality is that consumers will use and appreciate both.

"Pitting amateur and professional content against each other makes a good storyline, but it's misleading to see them as fundamentally opposed," says Werbach. "User-generated content will never match The New York Times for the overall quality of coverage of the Iraq war, for example, but reading Iraqi blogs, or political blogs about the war, provides some perspectives you won't get from any newspaper." And, he adds, "There's no way a traditional encyclopedia will ever match the coverage of Wikipedia, because there are so many more contributors. On the other hand, while the quality of most Wikipedia entries is surprisingly good, there are times you want the certainty of a reference work that is professionally edited and vetted, or a smaller set of resources that have been pre-selected by experts."

Worth a full read.