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: I want to start by asking you about the new influencers. Who are they and how are they different than the old influencers?

PG: The new influencers are individuals who are using the new bread of on-line tools to form communities around special interests in areas about which they have a passion and some of these people, certainly not most of them, but a few of them are acquiring significant influence in the markets that they care about – they’re building communities of interest with other passionate individuals and they’re becoming sources of information that are not only valuable to the markets that they serve, but also to the media that covers those markets. So we are seeing in some cases, individuals working all by themselves who are becoming really as important as long as old variable media institutions in markets that previously had a very high area to entry.

IB: So give me an example or two of some of these people?

PG: Well, one example I would offer is a Engadget which is a web site. It is a blog about technology. The conventional wisdom four years ago when a gadget was launched was that the last thing the world needed was another information source about consumer electronics but a gadget has grown to become one of the most influential and popular sources of information about that market, in large part because it used the characteristics of the medium, which is very rapid updating.

They came up with the idea that fast was a differentiator and what they found was there was a large body of consumer electronics fans, not to mention the industry itself, that valued that kind of speed and they have very quickly, they passed PC Magazine already in on-line traffic and they are closing in on the largest consumer electronics publications.

Another example on a smaller scale would be "Google Blogiscope" which is a blog all about Google which has become the largest independent source of information about Google and it is run by one person, one programmer in Germany who does it as a spare time project. He is getting four million visitors a month and he is a major player in the search engine market.

IB: But there was a situation with Engadget about a year or so ago where they published something about Apple or a rumour about Apple that they got that turned out to be untrue and Apple, you know, stock went down the toilet and then they corrected very quickly. They operate these blogs under very different principles than the main stream media.

I mean you said that they believed that being fast is really is more important than being right for them, which is a very different way of looking at things than the main stream media does.

PG: Absolutely and in this emerging culture, speed does trump accuracy. The expectation, I hear this from many top bloggers I have talked to – the expectation is that it is more important to post information quickly, to get it out there quickly than it is to get everything right and that because of the nature of the medium, mistakes can be corrected very quickly. So the idea really, it is a trade off. The value of getting of the information out, exceeds the value of waiting and getting every little bit right.

By the way, these people feel no regret about that. They have no doubt that this is the way to do it. The reason is that they don’t have the baggage, if you will, of the archival perspective of print and even broadcast media where traditionally, once something was published, it was there forever. There was nothing you could do about it. All the copies were printed and mistakes could not be tolerated and thus, the process developed around doing all of your fact checking up front because you couldn’t change once it was out in the field.

In the on-line world, the expectation is that something can be very quickly fixed and that therefore, you can take more chances with putting information out there that may be wrong, particularly if it is disclaimed as such. If it is noted as we are not entirely sure this is correct but this is what we have heard. What do you hear? And then it becomes an evolutionary process. I think the best example of this is Wikipedia which its model is prone to error. It is very easy for erroneous information to be posted on Wikipedia yet the correct information almost always emerges because of a community of people, watch dogs who make sure that that is the case. So I think it is these sites really are reinventing journalism around a whole different set of expectations about publishing.

IB: Now, some people would argue then, in fact, it is not journalism. If nobody is asking the question, how do you know this is true? Then it is not really journalism. All you are doing is you are typing. I mean, you were a formal journalist, how does it make you feel when people say, well, it does not matter whether I am right or not?

PG: Well, because I think there is a difference between being irresponsible and between making considered decisions. The people who I have met over the last three years or so who are defining this new trend, they are not irresponsible people. They are not people who are going to run with some highly speculative information and just fling it out there. They will, in some cases, take chances with information that they are not sure is one hundred percent correct, knowing that the risk of damage is much lower in a correctable media that it is in a non-correctable one.

So I sort of bristle at the, “this isn’t journalism argument”, because the people invariably say that are journalists and I think it is presumptive and I am a journalist, I am a career journalist myself, I think it is presumptive of those of us who call ourselves journalists to assume that there is one version of journalism, there is one definition of journalism and that we have a monopoly on the truth.

In fact, I would point to an example – there was a coup in Thailand, I believe last year, that was covered, quite coincidentally, by a young woman blogger who writes about fashion. It just so happened that she happened to be in the place at the time to see this coup unfolding and for a period of about a day, a day to two days, she was the sole source of information about what was happening in Thailand. Now, was this woman a journalist? Well, no, not by the conventional definition but she became the most important source in the world of information about an important breaking international event. She did by all accounts, she comported herself very well. Was that person a journalist?

Is a person who takes a photo with their camera phone of the shootings at Virginia Tech last year or who takes video of the shootings and that video winds up on CNN; is that person a journalist? Well, what they did was essentially an act of journalism. Maybe they do not have the credentials as a journalist. Maybe they didn’t go to journalism school, but what they did was at least a short-term, act of journalism. So I think that we have to discard a lot of our old assumptions and reopen the idea of what journalism involves.

IB: You said that these are not irresponsible people and that may be true, but they could be irresponsible people. There is lots of irresponsible people on Wikipedia who are, you know, changing entries and deliberately defaming people. So there is that potential?

PG: There certainly is and one of the interesting factors about, the way community standards are evolving, is that the potential for error and abuse is actually greater when few people have the ability to talk. When you throw open the gates and you give everyone the capacity to publish and comment and to contribute, then the quality of the discourse actually improves and the likelihood of error declines. Yes, the likelihood of a short-term error is certainly higher in this world but long-term, the community tends to correct itself. Much the same way that a democracy works. If everyone has an equal say, then in fact the overall quality of the discussion improves. There have been empirical studies on this involving the wisdom of crowds and the fact that a group of people collectively almost always delivers a better answer than the most knowledgeable person in that group.

So, and we see this happening on-line and you have mentioned Wikipedia which is a great model. Yes, there have been some examples of Wikipedia abuse. There have been very few examples of Wikipedia abuse. In fact, the most prominent one is about three years old at this point and yet there have been studies that have measured Wikipedia against well known printed references materials and find that its accuracy is comfortable. So the model does seem to work.

It does require some watchdogs. It does require some people who really care and in communities where nobody cares, then the conversation tends to degrade but when people collectively decide that they are going to build a useful and a valuable information resource, the more people who have the capacity to contribute to it, the better it tends to be.

I think that it is a system of trade offs. The strength of traditional journalism is that the product that was produced, you had a very high level of confidence that it was true although the journalism industry, at least, in the U.S. has been guilty. It shot itself in the foot pretty badly over the last few years in a number of well publicized incidents where that was not the case, but, nevertheless, you generally had a high level of confidence.

I think that, it is a trade off of quantity versus quality in many ways. I may not have the same level of confidence that everything is being reported as true but I do have a lot more information to choose from. There is a lot now that is covered that would never have been covered before.

You take an example of, take a community newspaper. You have community web sites now where people go to all kinds of events, meetings of the community of the local Better Business Bureau, the softball games, all sorts of events that would never have been documented previously because the local newspaper would not have the resources, are now documented. So you have a much richer variety of information to choose from.

Now, the quality of that coverage on the whole is worse than what you would have gotten out of a newspaper, but the quantity is a whole lot better and in some cases, we’re actually, I think moving towards a world in which news will be documented by audio and video images which will allow you to actually witness what was said. There is no better truth then being able to see it yourself. Also, keep in mind that there are counter balancing factors. When anybody can talk, then anybody's view of the truth can be posted, it can be published. So maybe the reporter reports something as a fact and the person who was quoted in that story, says, no, that’s not what I meant. This is what I meant, and they can publish that information and then they should be able to ask the reporter, please link to my response.

So instead of the traditional corrections mechanism which is a very weak way in print of correcting mistakes, what you have is actually a dialogue in which multiple perspectives are added to the story and the truth, in fact, is left up more to the reader to decide what is the true and some people will say, that is a bad thing. I actually think it is a good thing because I think the more information, the more perspective, you can access, then the higher quality overall of the information that you learn.

IB: You talked earlier today about the difference, if you are a marketer and dealing with the new influencers as opposed to dealing with the old influencers, meaning people in the mainstream media. What is the difference there when it comes to those two?

PG: I think the biggest difference is expertise and that is that the people who choose to self publish on-line, most of them make little or no money at it, are doing that in most cases because they want to, because they have a passion to share and this means that they are very knowledgeable.

The big difference for marketers is that when you are dealing with mainstream media, you are very often, because of the realities of that world, you are very often dealing with professional reporters who were not passionate about the topics they were covering. The move around beats all the time, they get reassigned and the chance that the reporter that you are talking to is going to be on that same beat a year from now is actually fairly small. PR people will tell you that they educate reporters all the time.

So the overall knowledge level of conventional media is lower than it is for new media simply because of the realities of the way reporting staffs operate. The other is that I think that the new influencers do not know how to play the game. Those of us who are professional journalists know that there are all sorts of unwritten rules about how you deal with marketers. There are things that you, there are wink and a nod agreements. There is an understanding that press releases will be sent to you even though they are useless, that there are certain client pressures that you try to respond to, you try to help each other out. You understand each other. Those rules do not necessarily exist because the new influencers do not have any background in journalism. They do not know how the game is played and you are not going to get in many cases, the same breaks that you will get from a mainstream media reporter.

IB: In the conventional model, the marketer sends out the press release or whatever and contacts the journalist, the journalist does what they have been trained to do to sift out the spin and to sift out the stuff that isn’t true or marginally true and then delivers to their audience what they consider to be the best available version of the truth. When that gatekeeper role no longer exists or at least is seriously weakened because with social media releases where you can talk directly to your customer without having to go through the media, isn’t there the danger then, in fact, instead of being a more enlightened relationship, in fact, it becomes worse because that filtering doesn’t happen anymore?

PG: Well, I would argue that, certainly, there is truth to that but I will argue that the model in which information is filtered through one person or maybe one person at an editor or two, is fundamentally flawed. To consider this, a reporter goes out and spends a day working on a story and conducts multiple interviews and at the end, turns in a five hundred word piece. Well, ninety-five percent of what that person learned during the day has been discarded and for the public never to see and there are all sorts of subjective decisions that are made in the process of publishing that article and these people are professionals and they are paid to do that well, but the fact is, what it comes down to is one person's view of the truth or a small number of people's view of what is important and what is true.

Now, the people reading that article may not share that view if someone, the reporter covers a fashion show, they may write about, they may choose to write about the hypocrisy of the designer for producing their products in sweat shops in Indonesia and yet there maybe people who are reading that article who really want to know about the fashions. They are not going to get that information because that is not what the editors and the reporters chose to write about.

If all that information, if that event is documented completely, then those people who may choose to want that information, can have it and there are others who may to choose to focus in on the sweat shop angle and that information will be available as well. So I think that the idea of filtering everything down through a single lens, is a flawed idea, but we didn’t have any choice in the past because that was the only way a media operation could work in an era when the media was scare, when information was scare. Information is not scare anymore, it’s is basically free.

That makes information plentiful which means that readers or consumers of information by whatever means, video or audio or whatever, should have access to as much information as they care to consume. The down side of that, of course, is the more of the burden than goes onto the consumer to figure out what is right and what is important, but I think the market is going to address a lot of that. I think we will see the emergence of the media aggregator whose job is really is more to assemble, filter and to set priorities than it is to actually decide what people can know and what they can’t.

I think that media organizations will evolve in the future, both conventional ones and emerging ones, into more of an aggregation role in which the role of the editor becomes less too report on all the information, although that function will certainly be needed but to compliment the reporting with a gathering together, a universe of information contributed by others who have their own observations and experiences and perspectives on that information and to filter that as kind of a large footnote if you will, or the reporting then done by the professional journalists becomes wrapped in this ecosystem of commentary and analysis that is contributed by people who do not have a formal role in the journalism process.

I think the way that news organizations have to evolve is to take the input or the community into the process and to make sense of it because the fact is, people cannot, you cannot give people a universal infinity of choice and expect that they will able to make sense of all that. People are going to need aggregators but with all of this new information that is now available to us, we should not be denied the ability to have that information available. What we should be able to do, is have a summary and then we should have a clickable summary. We should be able to dive down as deep as we want and into any of those other perspectives and investigate as well feel the need.

IB: So in some ways the reporter becomes almost an enabler for the community? I mean, they facilitate the kind of conversation as opposed to the more one ways or model that we have always had?

PG: Well, look at an example of what we are doing now. You are interviewing me. I don’t know what will become of this interview. It could be that the thirty seconds of this interview will actually ever, ever see light of day and it could be that as much as I trust you as a professional, it could be that you are out to get me and you will manage a piece together, some quotes that will make me look bad.

In the conventional media world, I have no recourse. I can call the editor who is going to side with you anyway and ultimately I will walk away frustrated and whether you were right or not, the fact is that others will have no opportunity to hear my side of the story. That is the conventional world.

Now, the new world is, I may say, I will do this interview but I would also like to post the entire audio recording on my blog and I would appreciate if you would link to audio recording from your story. You would be hard pressed to say, no, because after all, information is free. It does not cost. This is the truth. Our interview is the truth, so why not give readers the option of listening to the whole boring interview if they want and make up their own minds or I can say, Ira, I don’t agree with what you wrote. I have just posted my version of what we talked about and I would appreciate it if you would link to that.

I think that you, as a reporter, whose commitment is to the truth, should be willing to link to that perspective. You are not saying that I am right; you’re just saying that this is what I said. I think that is what the reporting model of the future looks like. The reporter is still a key, still the key figure in the process but the role evolves to become pulling together all of these different perspectives and it should be a completely transparent process. There is nothing about reporting process, the conventional mainstream media reporting process that is transparent at all. It is a complete mystery to readers and to listeners how it is done. I don’t think that makes sense. I think we should be transparent journalists. Our commitment is to the truth.

IB: Is this one of the reasons why the newspaper industry is dying as you suggested it is because that model is no longer viable. People are no longer prepared to accept that model?

PG: The newspaper industry in the U.S. and I don’t think that the same dynamics are true in Canada. The newspaper industry in the U.S. is dying because its economic model is no longer valid. Newspapers were built, the newspaper industry is built on the economics of scarcity, that information is scare and so large vertically integrated had to be created in order to disseminate information on a timely basis. That was the only way you could do it. Information is no longer scarce. Information is free. When you have a model that is built upon delivery at a high cost of a product that is now free, then you do not have a business.

Their economic model has completely been undermined and this is not unusual by the way. I mean, I have been in the technology business for twenty-years. This happens roughly every ten years in the technology. Every major company in an industry vanishes because their economic value proposition goes away. The rules change and that, it just so happens, that is what is happening in the newspaper industry right now.

I am not by the way extrapolating that and saying that is true of print publishing or that it is true of mainstream media. It is true of major metropolitan and daily newspapers and there will be lots of print franchises that will do very well in the future. Print is not going away but that particular business model just doesn’t have value any more.

IB: You talked earlier about how the professional filter has been replaced by the social filter, how people are more inclined to trust the word of people that they do not even know than people who are considered to be experts in the field. How did that happen? Why did that happen?

PG: It happened because of trust. One of the most interesting comments I heard in working on my second book was, a guy, a real social media, you know, enthusiast, told me at a conference, he said, I used to read, I used to look at Yahoo News and I would get Reuters and the New York Times and the Associated Press and Fox News and I would get all of these news organizations, would give me the news that was important to me. He said that has been completed replaced by a network of my friends.

I get all of my news now from "Facebook" and from "Twitter" which are two of the largest social networking, the most important social networking services. My news today is given to me by my friends. They tell me what to read. They tell me the interesting things they found that I should read and he said the reason this works for me is that those people are credible. Those people know who I am.

The editor of the New York Times doesn’t know who I am, so I have no question that that person is very professional and very knowledgeable but that news is not customized to me. What I am getting now, is news by people who really understand me and I think that, that was a very, very perceptive comment because we have in the past, we have had a core of maybe a few tens of thousands of people world wide, who told the other, you know, billions of people what they could know.

That was the only way you could do it in the conventional media model. Now, we have an environment where literally, hundreds of millions of people can tell each other what they should know. Is that chaotic? Yeah. Sure. Is it going to get better? Yes, it will get better. There will be organization that will come out of that, but now people have the option of getting their news from people who they trust intuitively.