For about a half an hour there, the net looked like it was going to revolutionize the news business. If everyone could be a reporter and a publisher, then the dominance of Big Media would be broken in favor of an Internet full of the rough equivalent of camcorders.

It didn't happen. It won't happen. And that's good.

The latest counts say there are something like 15 million people on the Internet. It seems self-evident-but maybe it isn't-that you can't trust them all. And even if the intentions of all 15 million people were honorable, isn't it obvious that everything they all say wouldn't necessarily be true?

Any publishing company worth the cover price of one of its products understands that those products need to be seen as trusted sources of independent information. That's why The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NetGuide Magazine, and any other decent publication survives: People trust what they read in it. That can be information of global import, like the Pentagon Papers, or it could be as trivial as accurate movie listings. But if readers don't trust a source of information, it won't survive long. Whether that source is a commercial institution or an individual, it eventually will be ignored.

Don't confuse "trusted" with "unbiased," incidentally. Some of the best journalism of this century took passionate points of view. But all great journalism is supported by facts and reputation. Somewhere in the chain, readers need to have a reason to believe what's being presented. Without that reason, there's scant difference between Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Dave Rhodes' "Make Money Fast."

The difference is frequently blurred on Usenet. All it takes to post to one of the 20,000 or so newsgroups is a net connection and a suppressed capacity for embarrassment. What was once a moderately reliable, if somewhat eccentric, place to exchange information about topics of common interest has devolved into a swamp of rants and pseudo-data. There are havens, but they are few. Usenet demonstrates in a particularly ugly way what can happen with the democratization of information.

Better are discussion forums on commercial online services. Maybe it's because people pay by the minute. Maybe it's because the forums on these services are actually owned and operated by entrepreneurs, who have a vested ownership interest in keeping the noise down.

Think about it. Without personal knowledge of the writer and the writer's experience, which are you more likely to believe: something you see at www.nando.net or www.nytimes.com, or something you read on rec.pets.cats? This is where the branding of information is important. An established news organization, one with a payroll, loyal readers, and advertisers, has lots more to lose than c00ld00d@aol.com if it puts out incorrect information.

A perfect case in point is the Motley Fool forum on America Online. Motley Fool is a somewhat unbuttoned and unconventional stock market special-interest area. Among the stocks that are discussed widely on the Fool is Iomega Corp., a disk-drive maker.

Iomega has been around for more than a decade and has had its share of ups and downs. Its stock has shown considerable volatility in recent months, apparently due at least in part to discussion of the company on Motley Fool. People posting to the Fool may or may not know more about Iomega than anyone else. That's not really the issue. What matters is what people believe the posters know. If you have a lot of money riding on a volatile stock, it's tempting to believe what's presented to you as inside information, even if it comes from c00ld00d.

In many places on the net, pieces of information sit next to each other, regardless of source or reliability. Run a Yahoo! or AltaVista search on a medical topic. You'll get information listed in uncritical order, placing authoritative material from the surgeon general right below a sales pitch from some quack with a net connection. How do you quickly tell the difference?

Does that mean you should only trust "branded" information? Not at all. Aaron Barnhart's reporting about late night television is some of the best in the business, but Barnhart has no traditional press credentials. Most of the best reporting about the Communications Decency Act is coming from people not affiliated with conventional news sources: Declan McCullagh, host of the "fight-censorship" mailing list, Mike Godwin, general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Aaron Dickey, who toils away compiling stock tables for the Associated Press.

None of these people are particularly unbiased. Barnhart started his reportage as pretty much a fan newsletter about David Letterman. McCullagh is not only outspoken against the CDA, he's a plaintiff in the lawsuit seeking to have it struck down. Godwin, also involved in the CDA suit, and Dickey continue to do exceptional work discrediting the infamous Marty Rimm cyberporn "study" and the religious right's campaign against the net.

But how do you distinguish the McCullaghs from the Rimms, the c00ld00ds from the surgeons general? Either everyone spends time getting smarter about the way information is gathered and distributed or we have some entity-a person, a bot, a committee-look at the stuff and put imprimaturs on it.

Of course, we already have people like that, who pass judgment for other people on the quality of available information. They're called editors. Their imprimatur is frequently called a publication. And again, we're back to the question of branded vs. unbranded information.

Hackers like to say that information wants to be free, both in the sense of "liberated" and "for no charge." That may be true. But editors and branding cost money. Most of the online information you can trust was paid for by someone. You may be consuming it for free, but the board of directors of Time Warner knows all too well that Pathfinder has cost it $40 million. Time Warner is actively looking for ways to make the net into a financially responsible enterprise. If it can't find it, Pathfinder will go away.

If you want information you can rely on, either you will have to pay for it or someone else (like an advertiser) will. This, of course, is how the publishing business works: Advertisers carry most of the freight while readers pay a nominal fee for access to the information.

Think of information on the net as one infinite row of those coin-operated boxes that sell newspapers on the street. Everyone who wants a box can have one. You, as an information consumer, can pick from any and all of them. How can you choose? You can pick names you recognize, stuff that sounds interesting, or publications that simply look good. How reliable is the information? Your guess is as good as mine. I'd be more inclined to rely on a publication with known editors and big-name advertisers than a thrice-photocopied manifesto. Then again, I'm in the magazine business, not the manifesto business. I'll read a manifesto-hell, I'll read anything-but I doubt that I'd trust it.

Big Media exists because people trust it and are willing to pay for it. C00ld00d exists because he's willing to pay for his connect time. It's doubtful that anyone would pay to read his rants. The camcorder approach to information has its place, and is where a lot of the excitement about the net comes from. Always be asking yourself about what you're reading and why it was put out there. And remember that good information always has a price.