I enjoyed your sneak preview at the SMC tonight, and enjoyed the thoughtful discussion afterward even more. I hope you'll take my comments constructively.

IMHO, your presentation is about packaging up for late adopters what the mainstream media is saying about the early adopters. There's a lot of money to be made among Doe Anderson's clients by doing that, but when you present that in Vegas, you'll just be proving what everyone already suspects about Kentucky.

If you want to have an impact in Vegas, tackle a problem that the early adopters are having. THAT'S where the value add is.

For one example in a field where there are a great many… suggest that the news media do exactly the opposite of what you said tonight.

A) don't just turn the news into an elementary school cafeteria with everyone shouting whatever pops into their head at the same time

B) adopt the attitude toward the “intelligent public” that you espoused today.

If the public is intelligent enough to follow procedures you establish, then give them the protections that allow journalists to be journalists. When they merit it.

Suggest this. Suggest that news outlets develop policies and procedures that WILL provide legal cover and protection to citizen journalists and their sources WHO FOLLOW THE RULES OF GOOD JOURNALISM. Why? Because the REAL citizen journalists are the people posting to WikiLeaks. Anonymously. With WikiLeaks servers being hosted in foreign countries and constantly shut down and blocked. Bring THOSE people in from the cold and into the fold, and you've extended the life of news media a hundred years. If those people can do their legwork and research and journalism, with access to materials your reporters would never have access to, and you can protect them and their sources… now you're changing the game.

Figure some of that out, or even get people thinking more about it, and you're talking the language of the early adopters. You're ADDING VALUE. That's what I would like to see a Kentucky boy do in Vegas.

Keith