I've discovered that I like listening to podcasts while I jog, and I noticed that Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch has been podcasting for awhile now. I finished listening to his June 26 interview with the Digg guys today, and something Mike said at the end of the interview struck me.

He was stating that - over time - user editing (i.e, the kind Digg does with its community) will beat out mainstream publications like the New York Times. He figures that the best writers will go independent, and their work will get picked up by sites like Digg. The bottom line - people will select democratized content over edited content.

I'm not so sure. I like Digg, and I check it regularly (using the feed in BottomFeeder). I do find that I'm reading fewer newspapers, but I haven't given up on editors. Rather, I've come to settle on a new set of them completely. Rather than faceless people at the (pick your paper here), I use various bloggers as my filter into the news. I follow people like Arrington, Scoble, Udell, and a raft of others (yes, even Winer - I may dislike his stance on RSS, but he does pick up on stuff I'm interested in) for tech news. I also use Techmeme and Digg - and, truth be told, the signal to noise ratio is way, way higher on Techmeme - nowhere near as much crap gets promoted up.

Which is not to say that Digg serves no purpose - far from it. I just wouldn't count on it as my sole source of input. Digg gets stories that would rarely get past a first cut on an editor controlled site, which does have value. There's room for both models, and I think most people will use both.