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.