Clay Sharky is author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. This transcript is part of an interview with Ira Basen for the CBC Radio Sunday Edition documentary News 2.0. Series air date on CBC Radio: Sunday, June 21 and Sunday, June 28, 2009.

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IB:You wrote that it's not a revolution unless somebody loses, and many professional journalists feel like they are the losers in this mass amateurization of journalism. So tell me what some of the upsides and downsides might be for journalists in this movement.

CS: Sure. The idea of mass amateurization started with an observation back in I don't know, 2002, 2003 as the weblog world was taking off, I don't know, hundreds and thousands and then millions of people had weblogs and there was a conversation essentially about how do we make money on this, now that we're all blogging right, we all have access to this publishing platform and we know that publishing is a business and publishing makes money, so how do we make money?

The mass amateurization essay which later became part of the book was my answer to that question which is, you don't. You can't have a mass, professional class by definition to have, to have a function in society being performed by professionals means by definition it's performed by a minority class. You can't professionalize something that's generally available in the same way that everybody can drive a car, and so driving is not a professional activity. If everybody can publish, publishing stops being a professional activity. Now there are certain kinds of drivers, race car drivers, bus drivers that do have a degree of training and control and so forth. So it doesn't mean that everything goes amateur, but it means that the activity performed by the broadest segment of society has to be amateur, it can't be professional, so the upside is essentially that we're seeing the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race, right and that's all previous media revolutions did one of two things - they were either good at forming groups as broadcast is good at doing and publishing is good at doing, you take a lot of signal from the centre, you take a lot of information at the centre and you publish it in books, in magazines, TV shows, radio shows, to people at the edges. Or media was good at two way conversation. I call you on the phone and you and I can talk together, but there was no media prior to the current era where you could have two way conversation amongst the stuff that was good at groups was bad at two way and vice verse, so now we have a world where everybody who was plugged into the grid, whether it's the internet or using mobile phones or what have you can be both a consumer and a producer of information and that just, you know, on the sort of metric of democratic norms of participation, that's an enormous positive change.

The downside as you also alluded to, particularly for people in the media is that the scarcity on which most media models are based is going away and when scarcity goes away, the price premium goes away and when the price premium goes away you can't support the industry as it currently existed, so we're in a position now where media in general, professional media in general and especially journalism is having to be rethought from first principals because the previous support for a lot of media in the industrialized world was the advertising model, and although it sounds crazy that the principal guarantor of the New York Times having reporters in Mozul, that the provider of the funds to send those reporters to Mosul is Bloomingdales, the department store. That's the situation we've got. No one ever said, "hey Bloomingdales is a great base to build a really critical function for a democratic society on." It just worked out that way. But it worked out that way for so long that I think we got lulled into a sense that this idea of you know, Bloomingdales funds investigative journalism started to seem like an eternal truth instead of a temporary bargain and now all of a sudden we're in a world where it looks like a temporary bargain and we're going to have to rethink what it is that we need from media and what are the business models that support that, again, from fairly first principals.

IB: You make a distinction between communications media and broadcast media. Is that what you're talking about here?

CS: Yes, well, I make that distinction when I'm talking about it precisely to say that's what's ended, that in fact, we've made the distinction between communications media and broadcast media for so long and so deeply, that when we say media, even though the word seems to be sort of middle layer, right, the medium between saying something and someone hearing something, or watching something or reading something. In fact, when we talk about the media, we never mean the telephone, right, the telephone is plainly a medium by some kind of description but it doesn't fit into our view of the media, so we've been, especially in the 20th century, right, the century of media revolutions, we've been used to a world where communications media and broadcast media were very separate and distinct entities and the only way you could get any spill over is when people in the broadcast media said we're going to allow ordinary citizens in here, right, we're going to put people on for talk radio, we're going to publish letters to the editor in the newspaper, you know, you can be queen for a day on television. Now, nobody needs help or permission to participate as an ordinary citizen in broadcast media, and that changed, that intermixing of the broadcasting communication patterns has enormous ramifications, both for the business of media obviously, but also for, frankly for the fabric of civil society.

The change for civil society is that here to for, when we've wanted to have, you know, Vox Populi with the voice of the people reflected in civic debate public issues being turned over, proposals being made, laws being passed and so forth, it has all, always been done by some form of indirection. Either we're electing representatives who argue these things on our behalf or rally around editorials or opinions or investigative work done on our behalf which helps synchronize public opinion, etc., etc. because the mechanisms by which the public could make its actual opinions known and even debate those opinions, were pretty much limited to polling and voting and those are very, very narrow channels. Polling only works when the questions are fabricated in advance and anyone who's ever taken a poll has probably had the experience of – you know, you've just asked me a question and rather than answer it, I'd like to say that's not the right question and here's why. Polls don't let you do that.

And then voting of course is the narrowest possible channel, this issue, yes or no or this person vs. that person vs. a political office. What we're seeing now is an environment in which the amount of participation that can be deployed by the citizens directly into the debate is quite extraordinary and there is a possibility in the United States that under the coming administration, President Elect Obama's administration, there will be significantly and even radically more transparency about the progress of ideas that become bills that become laws to be signed or vetoed that become either the law of land or get vetoed. The public's ability to see into that environment right now is quite limited. It's not exactly opaque, it's just it's very difficult to do and the cost of doing so keep people from participating.

There's a chance of lowering all of those thresholds to observing the process and there's a possibility that our civic discourse is going to benefit enormously from simply having more people expressing more opinions more of the time.

IB: You've also said that the definition of who is a journalist is outmoded at this point.

CS: Yes, you see the definition of journalists has heretofore been a, we viewed it as a kind of professional definition which is to say a certain stamp or seal of authority as if you were an architect or a doctor or what have you, but in fact, the definition of a journalist, at least as it's adjudicated in US law is anybody who's employed by a publisher. Journalists don't have or aren't seen in US law to have a, essentially to have a profession that is separate from publishing, or put another way, journalists are only defined as journalists because publishing is a bottleneck. Since it's so expensive to be a publisher, there are very few. The ratio of citizens to publishers in the United States is very small, so if we can simply list all the publishers, then we can simply describe their employees as journalists and we don't actually have to have an coherent internal definition of what a journalist is or does, and plainly now that publishing capability is almost universally available, certainly universally available to anyone that has a computer, that old bargain of we just defined journalists as people employed by publishers is well and truly broken and we start to see places where journalism is not a profession but an activity.

And so if journalism is thought of as an activity, then there's going to be people who do it part time, there's going to be people who do it full time, but you're not going to be able to find any place on that spectrum where you can say here is the end, like this person is the last journalist in a line of journalists and everyone past this point is an amateur - those two worlds are blended.

IB: Now I've been an editor, a gatekeeper, for a long time, and the two functions that we think we have traditionally performed is that we filter out spin which we think our audiences appreciate, and we improve the quality of people's work. What is going to happen to those two functions?

CS: Well, I think all of that stuff is true, right, but what you've described isn't that different from what anybody with a weblog can do. There are certainly people with weblogs to engage in a kind of truth telling, there's an academic named Juan Coal who was an early and vociferous critic of the Iraq War, the Bush administration's prosecution of the Iraq War because he also was an expert in the field, he became a kind of clearing house for this conversation, so holding politicians and corporations feet to the fire, and calling on false statements is, it remains a civically vital job and the ability to filter so that you say I'm going to engage in the relentless separation of the good from the mediocre and offer up only what I think is good or valuable again to my readers, listeners, viewers, etc. That function is also, I mean, the volume of crap has gone up you know, a thousand fold because of the internet, so it becomes much more important.

Those filters can't be tied to production scarcity and anyone who thinks they can is going to be out of a job. That's the difference. The two functions that you outlined, the skepticism of public statements by large actors, the relentless sorting of the good from the mediocre, things that society needed ten years ago, things society will need ten years from now, those are permanent features of the landscape. What's happening now is that those features have historically derived the revenue for the people that practice them from the upstream bottleneck of it's very expensive to publish a newspaper so only one or two newspapers get to exist in any town and all of the advertising dollars flow to those newspapers. It's very expensive to put out audio or it's very expensive to put out video. Those two kinds of value, the cost and difficulty of publication and the need society has for filters and truth tellers - those have now been decoupled. And people who think I have always relied on the scarcity premium of the old advertising model to subsidize my function as a truth teller, that linkage is doomed and there has to be ways for the truth telling function itself and the filtering function itself to become valuable, rather than relying on the publisher to throw off enough side income from the bottleneck that no longer exists.

IB: But part of my value as a truth-teller is that I get paid to do it and I can do it full time so presumably I'm better qualified to be a truth-teller than someone who has lots of other stuff to do with their lives.

CS: Yeah, no question. Mass amateurization does not mean total amateurization. It just means again that the gap between amateur and professional turns into a spectrum, that there's no corralling all of the amateurs in one place and all of the professionals in one place. The question of I have to get paid to do it, isn't I think the complicated question. Plainly, right, if you're going to have a professional class of truth tellers, a class of truth tellers who does it full time, they have to derive their income from some place. The question is, does that income have to come from Bloomingdales, and the old answer was just that 's how we've always done it, right? Nobody ever got up at the New York Times and said, we think that in the best of all possible worlds, shopping malls are going to be the people who give us enough money to send our reporters to Baghdad. So it worked out, so this isn't an attack on, what happened in the environment isn't an attack on the need for truth telling; it's an attack on the business model that says scarcity of publishing is the way to fund truth telling because that's broken.

And if we're serious about wanting truth telling… one of the reasons I'm very skeptical that many of the existing media outlets that do investigative journalism are going to survive this change is that as recently as three years ago, they were not out in public talking about their civic function; they were talking about how profitable they were and if, if in good times they'd said because of our critical civic function we're restructuring around the web to take better advantage of the new media, you might take them seriously, but in fact, many of the late converts to the critical civic function argument, are in fact restructuring to save the advertising jobs rather than the investigative reporting jobs so it's kind of hard to take their bonafides seriously about wanting to perform those functions. That's not universally true but there are a lot of media organizations that are now complaining about the change to the business model who three years ago were not complaining because it was working out in their favour.

IB: I want to talk about the whole idea of working for free. It's true that there are lots of reasions why people do things, but only one of those reasons helps pay the rent. And so when you write that people are prepared to do things for love rather than money, its almost as if you're saying the laws of economics or psychology are being overturned because people are no longer interested in securing a monetary reward for their work.

CS: I don't think, and in fact it's funny that you mentioned it because that passage in my mind was the great unfinished work of the first book. I knew that it was true, right, it was observably the case that a) people are not being paid to write Wikiipedia articles, and b) over four million Wikiipedia articles have been written, so some place, there has to be some explanation for what 's happening, because otherwise the thing looks crazy and in fact, there's a whole literature on Wikkippedia stretching back over seven years now saying, this is going to blow at any minute, it' s going to completely fail because no one's getting paid. That's not only never happened, it's continued to get better with each passing year, so the facts on the ground mean that that class of explanation is broken.

What's interesting is there is no coherent theory of motivation right now. It is a great not unexplained, but unsystemetized area of social sciences. If you read the economics literature, the sociology literature and the psychology literature on motivation, it's clear they're just talking about three different species because the ideas in each of those literatures are so different, it's hard to imagine any one person embodying all of them. I think it is not so much overturning the laws of economics, as noting that there are aspects of our lives that we have specifically non-economic motivations, right.

If you go on a date and it goes well, it can be appropriate the next day to send flowers, right. It's not appropriate to send the amount of money the flowers would have cost on the theory that money will be more useful, right. There are certain kinds of transactions where not only do people not do it for financial gain, it's actually considered unacceptable to do it on purely financial terms. So we've always known that those motivations exist, right, we take care of our children, we feed our friends, we take care of our parents. What's happening I think is that the range of things that those non-financial motivations can affect is expanding enormously to start overlapping pieces of the real economy. So if you are in the encyclopaedia business, right, plainly Wikiipedia is bad news for you. If you're in the operating system business, plainly Linux is bad news and so forth. We are now, as I said in the book we are now in the place where we can do big things for love. But nothing has changed about human nature. Human nature changes very, very slowly. This is not some new Age of Aquarius.

IB: But if I write for Wikiipedia I don't get paid and I don't even get recognition.

CS: Oh, yes you do. You just don't get it from the general public and this is actually one of the really interesting things about literature on motivation. It turns out, in the public discourse you often see love and fame as being treated as numbers on a dial, right. Love is when a small number of people appreciate you and fame is when a very large number of people appreciate you, but in fact they're very different kinds of things. Love is when a small number of people appreciate you - a small number of people who know you well appreciate you. Fame is when a large number of people who don't know you well appreciate you and if you want to understand Wikiippedia, go to the talk pages.

Every article has something called a talk page, it's a little tab at the top, a little link at the top and you'll see people arguing with one another about what the Wikiippedia article should or shouldn't contain or how it should or shouldn't be phrased. What people get is not you know, fame and an adoring public out there that knows my name. What those people get is the recognition of their peers and it is that small scale recognition and appreciation that motivates the people who, who contribute more than average to these Wikiippedia articles. They' re not doing it for us, they're doing it for each other and the fact that that's a side effect; really it's about the two people who know a lot about Dr. Who will argue on the Dr. Who talk pages about how certain things about various Dr. Who television shows and now movies should be expressed. They don't really care what people who don' t know a lot about Dr. Who think. It's much more a community of practitioners who have deep knowledge on particular subjects than it is a desire for any kind of you know, front page of a magazine sort of fame. Wikiippedia just harnesses a different kind of motivation than say Britannica, but it's still a very human motivation. It's about having the respect of people that respect you. . I mean, a lot of this stuff has to do with framing and people who are used to the old world of media where those of us in the general public were never allowed to have a voice think it strange that now we do. But for those of us for whom the experience of media also includes communications media, what Huffington Post or Flicker or YouTube or Delicious or any of the places these complaints are being raised. If you assume that it's closer in spirit to a communications medium than to a broadcast medium, suddenly it all becomes clear, right.

I walk into a bar and I buy a martini for $12.00. You know what goes into a $12.00 martini? Three dollars of gin, and nine dollars of being in a nice place where other people are hanging out, right. I could make that same martini at home for 25% of the cost. Why would I ever go to a bar where I'm contributing resources but the bartender is getting rich, and the answer is, because the bartender has by opening and operating the bar, created an environment where I get to be around you know, my peers, fellow human beings.

So what Huffington Post and Daily Beast and Gawker and a whole variety of these things – actually Gawker I think mostly pays, there's a bunch of models but these places where people are contributing – if you view that contribution as being analogous to the ways people did things for money, it looks like exploitation; if you view it as being an expansion of our desire to socialize with one another, it looks like an opportunity and so when I write something for Huffington Post, it's because you know, Arianna has created an environment in which more people or the kinds of people I want to see my stuff see my stuff.

Just like me handing over the extra $9.00 the bartender right, I recognize that the financial rewards are going to the people who created the environment, but that's okay with me because I don't want to be a publisher for the same reason I don't want to be a bartender.