Radio 3’s intellectual culture show Nightwaves hosted a ten minute discussion between myself and the political commentator Steve Richards on Monday night. You can listen again here. Steve is something of an old friend so we didn’t exactly row, but he gave a robust defence of ‘traditional’ journalism values in the face of my upstart concept of Networked Journalism, as outlined in my book SuperMedia.

Of course, it was only thanks to the traditional editing skills of the BBC producers that my pre-recorded comments made any sense. Steve’s point is that too much public access to media leads to ‘anarchy’ and that we need proper journalists with authority and editorial experience and skills to shape the news.

I don’t particularly disagree with that. Although I do think it is odd to think of diverse public expression as ‘anarchy’. I just think that there is a lot more to be gained by increasing public participation throughout the media process. But judge for yourself as you can listen again (the item was about 20 minutes in to the programme)