Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » Clay Shirky

Paul Bradshaw: journalism’s invisible history – and conflicted future

John Thompson — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:15:27 +0000

Paul Bradshaw is a visiting professor in online journalism at City University, London. This evening (Thursday 3 March 2011) he will be giving his inaugural lecture at City University: “Is Ice Cream Strawberry? Journalism’s invisible history – and conflicted future”. Here is an excerpt from it:

Cars, Roads and Picnics

Paul Bradshaw: not rotten

Throughout the 20th century there were two ways of getting big things done – and a third way of getting small things done. Clay Shirky sums these up very succinctly in terms of how people organise car production, road building, and picnics.

If you want to organise the production of cars, you use market systems. If you want to organise the construction of roads, you use central, state systems of funding – because there is a benefit to all. And if you want to organise a picnic, well, you use social systems.

In the media industry these three line up neatly with print, broadcast and online production.

The newspaper industry grew up in spite of government regulation
The broadcast industry grew up thanks to government regulation
And online media grew up while the government wasn’t looking.

Now some media organisations have generally organised along the lines of car production, and others along the lines of road construction. And there were some examples of alternative media that were organised like picnics. Different media organisations got along fine without treading on each others’ toes: The Times wasn’t too threatened by the BBC, and the NME wasn’t too threatened by the fanzine photocopying audiophile.

But digitisation and convergence has mixed these businesses together in the same space, leading to some very confused feelings from publishers and journalists.

This is how news production used to be: a linear process, limited by physical constraints. You went out to get the story, you came back to write it up, or edit it, and then you handed it over to other people to edit, design, print and distribute.

Production was the first part to become digitised, turning a physical good into an intangible one – this saved on transportation time and costs but it also meant that there were limitless, identical copies. And it lowered the barrier to entry which had for so long protected publishers’ businesses from competition.

Newsgathering was the next element to become digitised, as an increasing amount of information was transmitted digitally. In fact, in some cases journalists began to write computer programs to do the grunt work while they got on with more important business of investigating and verifying leads.

Then finally, media companies simply lost control of distribution. This has gone through a number of phases: initially distribution was dominated by curated directories and portals like Yahoo! and MSN, which then gave way to search engines like Google, and these are now being overtaken by social networks such as Facebook.

And this is not over: the net neutrality issue could see distribution dominated by telecomms companies – an issue I’ll come on to later.

This move from a linear physical production process to a non-linear one online is one of the bases for the Model for a 21st Century Newsroom that I published three years ago.

Disintermediated, disaggregated, modularised

As the media went online, three things happened:

It was disintermediated by the web,
Disaggregated by links
And modularised by digitisation.

Put in plainer language, once newsgathering, production and distribution became digital they could be done by different people, in different places, and at different times – including non-journalists.

It’s important to point out that there is no ‘natural’ way to do journalism. There are hundreds of ways to tell a story, to investigate a question, or to distribute information. Institutions and cultures have grown up out of compromises over the years as they explored those possibilities and their limitations.

When you remove physical limitations you remove many of the reasons for the ways for making those compromises.

Similar Posts:

Clay Shirky: WikiLeaks has created a new media landscape

Joel Gunter — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:43:50 +0000

Clay Shirky, author and professor at New York University’s interactive telecommunications programme, has contributed to the Guardian’s Comment if Free with an analysis of WikiLeaks’ effect on the media and publishing environment.

WikiLeaks, as my colleague Jay Rosen points out, is a truly transnational media organisation. We have many international media organisations, of course, Havas and the BBC and al-Jazeera, but all of those are still headquartered in one country. WikiLeaks is headquartered on the web; there is no one set of national laws that can be brought to bear on it, nor is there any one national regime that can shut it down

…

WikiLeaks has not been a series of unfortunate events, and Assange is not a magician – he is simply an early and brilliant executor of what is being revealed as a much more general pattern, now spreading.

Full post on Guardian.co.uk at this link.Similar Posts:

Nieman Journalism Lab: Clay Shirky’s ‘Cognitive Surplus’

Judith Townend — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:12:41 +0000

Nieman Journalism Lab has a review and analysis of media theorist Clay Shirky’s latest book and concept. ‘Is creating and sharing always a more moral choice than consuming,’ asks reviewer Megan Garber.

Cognitive Surplus, in other words – the book, and the concept it’s named for – pivots on paradox: The more abundant our media, the less specific value we’ll place on it, and, therefore, the more generally valuable it will become. We have to be willing to waste our informational resources in order to preserve them. If you love something…set it free.

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

Andrew Keen: ‘The internet will devour newspapers’

Judith Townend — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:27:31 +0000

Andrew Keen, writing on Telegraph.co.uk, reminds newspapers that they could be made redundant by the internet. Picking up a recent argument made by the author and academic Clay Shirky, Keen writes:

“The core reality of the internet is its absence of a centre. The distributed internet, all edge and no heart, has done away with the centralised structures of power of the old industrial world. And without a core, the news can’t be controlled by a central power. It can no longer be owned.

“The internet is like a blob, a centreless yet all powerful monster, impossible to destroy and yet able to devour everything in its path.”

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

Clay Shirky: ‘Rescuing the reporters’

Laura Oliver — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:54:58 +0000

Taking his own local paper as the basis for his argument, Clay Shirky looks at why local news reporters need ‘a rescue operation’.

“There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model,” he writes.

Newsrooms need to look at the people necessary to producing the ‘iron core of news’ (as defined by Alex Jones) and those who can’t be replace as easily as other areas of content, such as columns, suggests Shirky.

He goes on to argue that working for a non-profit news organisation will be an increasingly attractive option for these reporters as a result.

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

A journalistic limbo until we reach The New World

Benji Lanyado — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:20:47 +0000

According to many, the perfect storm is approaching. The winds have been whipping for a while. But there’s a problem. The Old King is dying but the New King, apparently, isn’t quite ready yet.

Clay Shirky, internet theorist and the harbinger-in-chief of newspaper death, encapsulated the problem at a recent Harvard Shorenstein Center talk:

“We are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism because the old models are breaking faster than the new models will be put in their place.”

He’s right. But, intriguingly, he also slings in a caveat. Shirky imagines a time in the future when everything is hunky-dory, and a broad conglomeration of multiple news organisations will ‘overlap and provide a small percentage of journalism individually, but taken as a whole, represent the same position of accountability held by newspapers in the 20th century’.

Perhaps. But until then, we’ve got a problem.

So what’s going to happen in this imminent limbo stage; when journalism enters an intermediate ‘state of nature’?

Allow me to imagine…

1) The paywalls go up, and a black market for scoops emerges

Paywalls and micropayment schemes begin to appear on news websites. A few of them make a decent stab of it: News International in particular, as they have a competitive advantage.

As Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy suggests, Murdoch’s sites begin corralling in Sky News, Sky Sports, Fox as well as umpteen other publications and broadcasters that it owns, offering an attractive package behind the wall.

Jason Wilson, writing at NewMatilda.com, suggests that News Corp will ‘draw on its corporate experience with pay television to leverage audiences and money using niche content of various kinds’ kicks in, and, for a while, it all seems to be working.

Desperate to lure readers beyond the paywalls, the organisations that enacted them scramble for scoops. They get dirty. They hunt for drug scandals and nip slips like never before. Investigative journalism becomes feral. They get some real goodies.

Infuriatingly, the exclusives start being screengrabbed and hijacked on pop-up sites.

A black market for scoops emerges, but readers don’t care if the scoop they are reading is 14th hand and poorly delivered, because they’ve still got it.

Shane Richmond notes in the Telegraph that ‘it doesn’t matter that versions of the story on free sites ‘won’t be as good’ because they’ll be free, which offsets the loss of quality considerably’ (and Google’s Eric Schmidt agrees).

In their death throes, the news organisations desperately extend the paywalls, harvesting as much profit as possible while waiting for the web fairies to work out how to monetise content differently.

They start collaborating, agreeing on micropayment schemes across a broad spectrum of organisations, hoping to regain a semblance of market control. It’s too late. The black market is growing exponentially (in the same way as news stories used to, before the walls stripped them of any possible magnifying effect).

As Mike Masnick suggests in a brilliant debate at PBS Mediashift, with the media heading over a cliff, paywalls become an anvil rather than a parachute.

2) The non-paywall sites are damned because they didn’t

Those organisations who resist the paywalls enter a brief honeymoon period. They have a whale of a time as readership goes through the roof following The Great Paywall Migration.

As Masnick imagines, ‘many of their biggest competitors just took themselves out of the market. If I’m running a major newspaper the night that everyone starts to charge, I’m dancing for joy because my competitors just stepped out of a huge market and left it to me’.

But there’s no plan B. After the initial migration surge, the profits of the non-paywall organisations resume their downward spiral, albeit from a higher peak.

They try building their businesses around an events model, but this quickly runs out of steam, and distorts their raison d’etre – news – into a poor-quality loss leader.

They experiment with membership schemes, but find that in an increasingly mobile, classless age, there just isn’t a demographic for them to rely on.

3) The fall of ‘quality’ news

All the big news organisations find themselves in a major pickle. They have century-old reputations to maintain, and a decimated budget with which to maintain them. But their readers expect the same volume of content. So the news organisations begin churning out rubbish.

Freelancers are axed, in-house editors and writers are forced into frantically doubling their output, and original reporting is replaced by regurgitated press releases and wires.

As Roy Gleenslade already sees, ‘the press is no longer acting as a watchdog. It does not bite or bark. It has muzzled itself and retired to the kennel to live off PR scraps.’

Scandals begin to go un-investigated by the big organisations because of a lack of funds and a burgeoning, necessity-driven penchant for boobs and celebrities. Regional controversies are deemed not ‘mass-appeal’ enough to be pursued by the nationals, and there’s no regional paper left to fill the void.

Society flounders without a thriving journalistic watchdog. Clay Shirky’s dystopian prediction, voiced at Harvard, of an increase in ‘casual endemic corruption’ in small communities comes to pass, writ large.

4) The rise of ‘all blogosphere’, and the government subsidy solution

Meanwhile, in tiny office-bedrooms across the country, thousands of new online news organisations are doing nicely. The black market scoop-jackers die out, and a new, mature breed begin to emerge.

The vast majority are rubbish. But some aren’t. They start getting the local scoops that the big organisations don’t have the resources to cover.

Occasionally they get something big. The good ones build enough of a readership to start cashing in.

Without the giant newsrooms and overheads, they begin to turn a modest profit. The blogosphere becomes what it has always threatened to be (and in some places – notably the US – already is, almost) a fantastically broad, fragmented organic news source.

But the quality still isn’t quite there. Obama’s prediction of an ‘all blogosphere’ news environment becomes dangerously close to realisation. The old news organisations that are still clinging on for life have one final play left in them, and turn to the government en masse.

In the face of widespread industrial pressure, and public pressure born of a desire to see journalism saved from the realms of populism and boobs, governments begin to bail out the bigger news organisations. In Britain, the BBC subsidy is chopped up and dished out to a handful of stripped-down organisations in return for a stake and light-handed influence.

5) The New World

Shirky’s vision of a conglomeration of multiple news organisations begins to take shape. A handful of old media names, dramatically reduced in size and scope, survive thanks to government propping. This ‘new BBC’ competes with the vastly augmented blogosphere, and journalism becomes healthy once again.

A version of this post first appeared on BenjiLanyado.com. Benji Lanyado (@benjilanyado) is a freelance journalist based in London and a travel writer for the Guardian and the New York Times. Similar Posts:

Nieman Journalism Lab: Clay Shirky – Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good

Judith Townend — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:04:16 +0000

The Nieman Journalism Lab has helpfully supplied the audio and a transcript for a talk by Clay Shirky, NYU professor and internet theorist, at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University this week. Shirky looked at social accountability in the context of shifting business models for news.

“I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

Jon Bernstein: Why ITV’s micropayment plan is unlikely to make the Grade

Jon Bernstein — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:30:34 +0000

ITV management had better hope Ben Bradshaw’s deeds are as good as his words, because its faith in an another revenue-generating scheme looks misplaced.

Bradshaw, the recently appointed Culture Secretary, told the Financial Times earlier this week that the BBC’s refusal to relinquish licence fee money to aid other broadcasters with a public service remit was ‘wrong-headed’. He said the corporation’s hierarchy would have to come to its senses sooner or later.

While the BBC fights the good fight against ‘ideological’ forces such as these, part of the network gave airtime to a would-be recipient of top-slicing: ITV’s executive chairman, Michael Grade.

On BBC Five Live last Thursday, Simon Mayo asked Grade about the YouTube Susan Boyle affair (some 200 million video views to date).

After describing YouTube’s proposed revenue-share for the Boyle clips as ‘derisory’, Grade insisted ITV wouldn’t get caught out again:

“We are working on it and watch this space, but we’re all going to crack it, either when the advertising market recovers or a combination of advertising and micropayments which is 50p a time or 25p a time to watch it.

“We may move in time, in the medium term, to micropayments, the same way you pay for stuff on your mobile phone. I think we can make that work extremely well.”

(You can listen to the interview on the iPlayer until midnight Wednesday 15 July. Grade interviews starts around 1 hour, 22 minutes.)

Despite Grade’s confidence there are grave doubts that paying per clip is going to work. Here are four reasons to worry:

1. Micropayments don’t work for perishable goods
It’s an argument that has been made against charging for news stories, but it is equally applicable when you are talking about clips from a reality TV programme.

Quality drama may have a shelf-life and an audience willing to pay for it, but a water cooler moment from reality TV? Not likely.

The Susan Boyle phenomenon still feels vaguely current, but it is a passing fad.

If you’re unconvinced take this quick, highly unscientific test: would you pay 50p to watch the machinations of ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman from the first series of Big Brother?

The correct answer: who’s ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman?

2. Micropayments put people off
Writing back in 1996, social scientist Nick Szabo introduced the idea of mental transaction costs. He argued that no matter how small the payment, it still incurs effort on behalf of the potential buyer to work out if he or she is getting a good deal.

He wrote:

“The reason we don’t do the things is that they’re not worth the brain cycles: we have reached the mental accounting barrier.”

And that in a nutshell is why micropayments are doomed to failure.

It’s a theme Chris Anderson touched on in his recently released book ‘Free: The Future of a Radical Price‘. He wrote:

“It’s the worst of both worlds – the mental tax of a larger price without the commensurate cash. (Szabo was right: Micropayments have largerly failed to take off.)”

Unsurprisingly, Anderson advocates free as a preferable alternative to micro, but he’s not alone. New York professor Clay Shirky is with him.

In fact Shirky has been saying much the same thing since the beginning of the decade and his 2003 essay ‘Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content‘ has become something of a set text.

3. Micropayments only work if you control distribution
ITV’s Grade rightly cites mobile phones as a great platform for micropayments.

The network operator controls what is available via the handset, limiting availability and ensuring prices won’t be undercut.

Further, the operator offers a simple and largely pain-free way of paying for goods by adding the cost to a monthly bill or subtracting it from a top-up on a pay-as-you-go phone.

But the web is different – it’s anarchic, open, a free-for-all.

Nobody controls distribution and despite efforts to chase down copyright abusers, there will always be someone ready to undercut your micropayment with an even smaller charge – free.

Opponents of this reading cite Apple’s iTunes Music Store as proof that micropayments can work on the net. But, as Shirky argued earlier this year, the fee-per-track model works because this is a rare example where no alternative exists.

“Everything from Napster to online radio has been crippled or killed by fiat; small payments survive in the absence of a market for other legal options.”

Further, Apple does control part of the distribution, successfully creating a market for the must-have iPod.

So despite Grade’s assertion, it’s unlikely any micropayment system on the internet will turn out ‘the same way you pay for stuff on mobile phones’.

Incidentally, it will be worth watching to see how the smartphone redefines this divide between the largely ordered phone network and the web.

4. YouTube clips drive traffic first, revenues second
If you think about a clip on YouTube as a direct money maker, you’ve got your priorities wrong.

It’s about reach, exposure and promotion. It’s about creating a buzz and driving traffic back to the core.

Did the Susan Boyle clip achieve this? No question.

For starters, video views at ITV.com were up 528 per cent year-on-year and advertising slots for the duration of the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ season sold out.

Meanwhile, such was the interest around the show, the final was seen by 19.2 million people – ITV’s highest audience since England vs. Sweden in the 2006 World Cup. More eyeballs this year promises high advertising yields next.

In short YouTube kept its part of the bargain.

Would all that have happened had ITV charged 25p a clip? Would 200 million people have checked it out? Will a pay-per-clip Britain’s Got Talent be a winner?

The twist in the tale is that Grade, who steps down as executive chairman at the end of the year, won’t be around to find out.

Jon Bernstein is former multimedia editor of Channel 4 News. This is part of a series of regular columns for Journalism.co.uk. You can read his personal blog at this link.Similar Posts:

Essential journalism links for students

Judith Townend — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:56:59 +0000

This list is doing the rounds ‘100 Best Blogs for Journalism Students – Learn-gasm‘… and we’re not on it. Nope, not even a smidgeon of link-love for poor old Journalism.co.uk there.

The BachelorsDegreeOnline site appears to be part of e-Learners.com, but it’s not clear who put the list together. Despite their omission of our content and their rather odd descriptions (e.g: Adrian Monck: ‘Adrian Monck writes this blog about how we inform ourselves and why we do it’), we admit it is a pretty comprehensive list; excellent people and organisations we feature on the site, our blog roll and Best of Blogs mix – including many UK-based ones. There were also ones we hadn’t come across before.

In true web 2.0 self-promotional style, here are our own links which any future list-compilers might like to consider as helpful links for journalism students:

Journalism.co.uk for industry news, events and developments

Journalism.co.uk Editor’s Blog for the titbits, tips, trade tools, recommendations and daily editors’ picks.

TNTJ blog: Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists

Insite: an advanced internet research skills.news blog by Journalism.co.uk’s consulting editor and trainer, Colin Meek.

Journalism.co.uk training section and forums.

And here are some blogs/sites also left off the list which immediately spring to mind as important reading for any (particularly UK-based) journalism students:

Organisations

Global Voices Online – essential for anyone interested in press freedom issues (Co-founder, Ethan Zuckerman’s blog, is here)

The Frontline Club blog, as above.

European Centre for Journalism (EJC)

WEF Editors’ Weblog and SFN blog.

Crikey.com: news from down under that’s not Murdoch, or Fairfax produced.

Press Review Blog (a Media Standards Trust project) – it’s a newbie, but already in the favourites.

Centre for Journalism from the University of Kent

The UK National Union of Journalists news site and its president, Jeremy Dear’s, blog

AllMediaScotland.com

The Independent’s Media section

NY Times’ media section

FT.com media section

Press Gazette’s Peter Kirwan/The Wire

BBC Editors’ Blog

BroadcastNow.co.uk

StinkyJournalism: it’s passionate and has produced many high-profile stories

Wired Journalists

Index on Censorship

Demotix blog

Reporters Without Borders

Committee to Protect Journalists

International Federation of Journalists (though we’ve had problems accessing their site or feeds lately)

British Journalism Review (now in its 20th year)

Individuals

Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error

MST director, Martin Moore’s blog

Clay Shirky

CurryBet – Martin Belam’s links are canny, and provocative and break down the division between tech and journalism.

Malcolm Coles – for SEO tips and off-the-beaten track spottings.

Dave Lee – facilitating conversations journalists could never have had in the days before blogs.

Joanna Geary – as above

Marc Vallee – photography freedom issues from the protest frontline.

FleetStreetBlues: an anonymous industry insider with jobs, witty titbits and a healthy dose of online cynicism.

Alison Gow for a view from the regionals

Sarah Hartley previously as above, now with more online strategy thrown in.

The e-Grommet for links.

Charles Arthur – for lively debate on PR strategy, among other things

Shane Richmond’s blog at the Telegraph.

MarkMedia (view from Scandinavia)

Kristine Lowe (as above)

Media Culpa (as above)

Richard Sambrook, BBC big cheese and excellent blogger

Justin Williams, Telegraph assistant editor

Matthew Buckland, media views from South Africa

Steve Buttry

Craig McGill – bridging journalism and PR.

Writing this has only brought home further the realisation that omissions are par for the course with list-compilation, but it does inspire us to do our own 101 essential links for global online journalists – trainees or otherwise. We’d also like to make our list inclusive of material that is useful for, but not necessarily about, journalists: MySociety for example.

Add suggestions below, via @journalismnews or drop judith at journalism.co.uk an email.Similar Posts:

Rusbridger on the future of journalism: “I don’t think we would ever go back to having a little pool of elite commentators”

Judith Townend — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:44:06 +0000

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s (@arusbridger) thoughts shared with the web this week:

Here, in yesterday’s lecture at Queen Mary, University of London, part of the university’s Art Week 2009.

And a video of Alan Rusbridger at the Institut für Medienpolitik in Berlin on April 22, speaking on the future of journalism and explaining how the Guardian opened up its site to a wider pool of contributors. Some extracts:

“I don’t think we would ever go back to having a little pool of elite commentators, who help appeal to themselves.”

“(…)Bad things are going to happen where newspapers are going to die. There are going to be fewer journalists and the really pricey business of quality journalism is going to require subsidy from somewhere. It’s a broken model.”

On Twitter: “You harness this brilliant pool of knowledge out there. It’s a fantastic marketing tool. It’s a fantastic journalistic tool.”

He says reading Clay Shirky, Adrian Monck, Jeff Jarvis and the Niemen Foundation, via Twitter, is like receiving a personalised wire feed on the world’s press each morning – a service you’d have paid a consultant a lot of money for, in the past.

(NB: We’re glad to note that he’s following @journalismnews too…)

Alan Rusbridger on the Future of Journalism from Carta on Vimeo.Similar Posts:

Adrian Monck: A response to Clay Shirky on newspaper paywalls

Laura Oliver — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:56:08 +0000

Adrian Monck argues against Clay Shirky’s post earlier this week on the broken business model of newspapers, in particular the success of paywalls for financial news sites.

Their survival is ‘based around a professional community, no around the value of information per se’, writes Monck.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

Clay Shirky: The old model’s broken – don’t try to replace it

Laura Oliver — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:51:40 +0000

“‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’ To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke,” writes Shirky.

The problem that publishing fixed – reducing the cost and difficulty of making information available to the public – has stopped being a problem because of the internet, he adds. As such it’s becoming less relevant to talk about ‘a publishing industry’.

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

Online Information 2008 kicking off now

Judith Townend — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:31:25 +0000

Clay Shirky, author of ‘Here Comes Everybody’ is the keynote speaker at Online Information 2008, a conference designed to bring together technology and content. Here’s a preview of Shirky from YouTube (part one. Part Two here):

We’ll keep an eye on the Twitter reports which don’t seem to have started yet – probably on this tag when they do.Similar Posts:

AOP: Today’s television ‘may not be worth sitting still for’, says US author Clay Shirky

Judith Townend — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:14:36 +0000

Even children can’t concentrate on television anymore, says Clay Shirky, the US-based internet educator, consultant and author of ‘Here comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations’.

In his speech at yesterday’s AOP Digital Publishing summit Shirky told an anecdote about the four-year-old daughter of one of his friends watching a film: “[S]he jumps round behind the TV and [starts] rooting around in the wires, looking for the mouse.”

Today’s television ‘may not be worth sitting still for’, but the computer is for everything.

The problem for media professionals is that the industry still holds the perception that everyone sees publishing in the same way, he explained.

But, he said, citing the example of Flickr, material may be ‘in public but [it's] not for the public. The cost of putting something out in public has fallen so low.’

“This is a reversal of the usual pattern,” he said. ‘Gather and share has been the usual pattern [of publishing] since time immemorial’, but now grouping comes first.

He split his talk into three categories: the sharing culture of Flickr; the collaborative nature of Wikipedia; and the collective action of internet groupings, citing the use of a Facebook group to force HSBC to reverse its decision on withdrawing students’ interest-free overdrafts.

These examples, he said, show the ‘the environment that’s coming’ and a need to re-think the model’.

“If you wait to hear what the business model is you will hear that your competitors have perfected it,” he said.

Shirky compared today’s media trends to London’s 17th-century gin craze: at first people didn’t know what to do with what they were consuming, but they then learnt how to share, collaborate and collect.

“The action is where people are going after the consumers. Not just consuming, but producing and sharing.”Similar Posts: