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New Gatekeepers Are Still *GATEKEEPERS*
Doc, in the above, you've written a typical piece on "How a writer should make an effective pitch to an editor to get the story accepted". It's just not thrilling to be told one can pitch articles to A-listers just like one can pitch articles to any other gatekeeper. The point is that (per-topic!) there's a very few people who have an enormous amount of influence on whether anyone else gets heard - i.e. gatekeepers. And critically, if the topic's gatekeepers don't like you - for whatever reason, maybe being an angry feminist, maybe having a big mouth, maybe because you supported someone else in a political fight they were in - then it's that much harder to get one's articles through the gate (not impossible, but the odds are that much more against you). Moreover, a "little guy" who is personally attacked by a gatekeeper HAS NO *EFFECTIVE* WAY of reaching the audience who hears the personal attack. It's a kind of let-them-eat-cake when an attack is heard by thousands, tens of thousands (*hundreds of thousands*?), to be told that a page sitting out on the end of the Long Tail is somehow equal to that sort of megaphone, because everybody could *in theory* read it. They won't, and to say otherwise starts to become downright cruel.
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