Right now, we are trying to figure out how far the mix of professional and crowd reporting can go, Lieberman said, and we should think about the “tension between education and regulation” that exist on the Internet. The
business community wants to simply educate consumers to be “better buyers,” according to Lieberman, who thinks that that is not enough and that the system needs more regulation and oversight of business. “We gone from a Consumer Movement to Consumerism,” Lieberman said. She defined Consumerism as the art and act of buying, but also as a celebration of shopping and the belief that it will fix economic problems. Yet now the marketplace is even more complex, from personal electronics, to credit instruments, to “hidden stuff” in our foods. “We need a Consumer Movement more than ever right now,” Lieberman said, adding that the challenge will be “finding a home for this movement on the Internet” and moving away from the “herd mentality” of user reviews. She disagrees, to some extent, with the “wisdom of the crowds” and is a “Consumer Reports person at heart” who believes in the value of expert opinion, especially when it comes to things like healthcare. She thinks we need to translate the long-form journalism of traditional media to the Web in a way that will replace some of the “constraints on business” lost to deregulation.

McKean then introduced Bob Garfield, a columnist for Ad Age magazine, host of National Public Radio’s On the Media, and creator of Comcast Must Die, a Web site devoted to letting customers “vent their grievances” against the company. Garfield then told the story of how he’d been receiving “horrendous,” yet “run-of-the-mill” service from Comcast, so he decided to write about it at work under the headline, “Comcast Must Die.” “Nobody read my AdAge blog until that day,” Garfield said. He had so much feedback that he decided to create a Web site under the same name. “Evidently, I touched a nerve,” he said. Now, a year later, he is “amazed” that the site has been able to hold Comcast’s attention and generate positive change. Garfield says that he now has “the most delicious cable service in the United States of America.” Yet the more Comcast has tried to appease him - the more it has tried to “smear grease on the squeaky wheel” - the angrier he has became. Garfield pointed to BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis, who was sitting in the audience, and credited him founding that approach with a blog post on his site titled, “Dell Sucks.”

McKean then turned to David Cay Johnston, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and author of the article in CJR’s package on consumer reporting entitled, “The New Consumer Vigilantes and Why They Matter.” With the rise of amateur reporting, McKean asked, “What’s going to happen to investigative reporting - the muckraking journalism of the 20th Century?” Johnston immediately replied that he thinks there is more investigative reporting now than there was four years ago, even at small and medium-sized papers. “Clearly the financial model of newspapers is being destroyed by the Internet,” he said, “but readership has been rising tremendously.” And people are very well informed these days, but it’s true that “there is unbelievable pressure” on news organizations. To compete in the market, they need to do a better job of “telling people that which they do not know” and “stop listening to company PR people.” In particular, he said information that is useful to small businesses is rare, and that newspapers tend to ignore small, but important, stories like the excessive surcharges that banks are imposing on debit-card holders. McKean chimed in to say that he’s noticed that “power follows the money” and considerations for advertisers, one of the only revenue sources available on the Web, can outweigh editorial decisions.

McKean then introduced Ben Popken, the editor of Consumerist, a citizen-journalist Web site covering a wide variety of consumer issues, products, and services. McKean noted that Consumerist, which is only two-and-a-half years old, gets roughly 15 million page views a month whereas Consumer Reports’ Web site gets only 5 million. But he wanted to know if independent sites and blogs such as Popken’s follow a code of ethics and do
“actual reporting.” Popken said that Consumerist offers “a panoply of information,” from breaking stories, to tips and insider confessions from company employees. It publishes 18-24 stories per day, 95 percent of which originate from reader tips. One of the most successful user-generated stories was one about “shrinking” products at grocery stores. Readers sent in before-and-after pictures from supermarkets around the country as companies downsized their wares. As popular as Consumerist has been, however, Popken noted that the site is for sale. “It’s hard to survive on an advertising revenue model,” he said, because Consumerist doesn’t “pull any punches” in its reviews.

McKean turned next to Harry McCracken, a former editor at PC World magazine and now the founder and editor of Technologizer, a new Web site and community about personal technology. McKean asked why McCracken had made the shift from “old to new media,” and if new media could fill the shoes of the old. McCracken responded that he disliked being an editor at PC World because it did not allow him to think, report, and write. What he likes about online publishing is that he can do all of that and didn’t need a lot of start up capital, a large staff, a circulation desk, or administrators. “I deeply believe that the Web is an equal-opportunity newsstand,” he said, “and if your content is compelling people will find it and you’ll do well. And if it’s not compelling, nobody is going to read it whether you’re a big company or an individual.”