What to put in, what to leave out?

Robert Scoble blogged on Monday about Charlie Rose talking to bloggers on his show. His point: Don't leave out the geeks, and he goes on to list them (some just by first name, as if we all know pioneering blog geeks by first name).

Scoble's point is excellent: You want to get all the right people in your piece.

But this is the curse of mass media: When you leave someone out, they're OUT. You've screwed up. You can't get it back. And if you were an expert on the subject, you might have known better, but you aren't, so you didn't. And tomorrow the subject will be bass fishing lesbians. Ready... GO!

The grass-roots notion that "there's more knowledge out here than in there" could change this equation and improve our ability to get the right people to the table, but we're going to have to bring a lot of MSM decision-makers to this discussion before that's going to happen regularly.

(A secondary point: As bloggers become more popular and their comments take on transformative weight, they too will become subject to this problem. It's easy to say hurtful things when nobody really gets hurt, to exclude people when it's a private party. But scale changes things. It's like growing up. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)