This article by Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) on GigaOm (@gigaom) summarizes author and Internet technologies consultant Clay Shirky’s (@cshirky) interview with Findings (@findings), a site for collecting, sharing, and discussing clips people find when using their Amazon Kindle and from any website. Shirky pronounced publishing itself is no longer a job, “it’s a button.” He said, “We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.”
His point is the same as the one [technology journalist] Om Malik (@om) made in a post about what he called the “democratization of distribution” that social media and other Web tools have created: namely, that publishing is now something anyone can do. You no longer have to be part of a priesthood or guild of professionals, whether it’s the book-publishing industry or the traditional newspaper business, in order to create content that can (theoretically at least) reach tens of thousands or even millions of people.
And what are publishers to do amidst this kind of disruption? The unique control publishers once had in owning a publishing platform or distribution system “— and the ability to manufacture demand or create information scarcity that came along with it — is effectively gone forever.” Shirky says publishers need to add value where it’s now required:
The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet.
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