I saw an interesting news item (in a traditional news source, the Financial Times) last week. The Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study suggesting that traditional journalists are trying — perhaps in vain — to save us from ourselves. The study compared one week’s news choices of traditional journalist-managed news outlets (print, TV, radio, and online) to those of the user-determined sites Digg, del.icio.us, and Reddit. These latter sites have been hailed as restoring journalistic power to the people; they allow our news to be selected not by a cabal of elitist editors, but by the preferences of our fellow journalistic amateurs. They have also been criticized by a minority of observers, including Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, as catering to lowbrow tastes for cant and celebrities.