Andrew Keen's Dumb Punditry

The Internet's days of being dominated by the anonymous, the amateur and the agitating are numbered, according to Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur.

"I'm hopeful we're coming to our senses," he says.

The Internet was projected to be a $15-billion economy, he says, but that turned into a "false promise" as it essentially became a network of amateur bloggers posting whatever they wanted.

No one is willing to pay for online content, he says, so the only way to make money is through advertising. Businesses, however, don't want to associate themselves with the kind of nasty, objectionable or unreliable content that is often the result of a wide-open field of unknown users, he says.

In the worst year in history for publishers, newspaper shares dropped an average of 83.3% in 2008, wiping out $64.5 billion in market value in just 12 months.

Although things were tough for all sorts of businesses in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s, the decline among the newspaper shares last year was more than twice as deep as the 38.5% drop suffered by the Standard and Poor’s average of 500 stocks.

The debacle was widespread and thoroughgoing, as detailed below. Here are some highlights from the data:

:: The shares of eight of the 14 publishers tracked in the survey fell by 90% or more. The best-performing companies were the Washington Post Co., New York Times Co., and News Corp., but WaPo, the least battered issue of all, still fell 51.5%.