Transcript: Chris Anderson's views on 'News 2.0'

Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of  Wired   Magazine. 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.

IB: You've talked about a shift from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance and that has a lot of implications all the way down the line. Talk to me about what the implications are for that, someone who, say, is a magazine editor? What it means for the magazine business, the newspaper business…

CA: It's interesting. I mean I live in both worlds. I have a website and I have a magazine. The magazine is a classic scarcity economy. So every page is expensive, we have limited pages, we are very discriminating about what gets on. On the website, we have infinite pages, the pages are very cheap, we are less discriminating, which is not to say that we lower our standards, we just have a broader range. In my magazine job, I say no to almost everything. My job is to say no. In my web job, my job is to say yes. In my magazine job, we polish it and try to get it all perfect before we print, because we can't do anything about it. Online, it's a work in progress. We improve as we go. You know, in the magazine, it is classic top-down organizational structure, command and control. Online, most of our writers are not professional journalists. They are bloggers, and our readers are some of the contributors as well. Completely different organizational models. Completely different management models. They both have a role, I feel sort of equally comfortable in both places. One is incredibly controlled and one is incredibly messy.

IB: It seems as if in the economy of abundance, the whole idea of the gatekeeper is disappearing, in journalism and other places, because you don't need the gatekeeper. So tell me something good about the gatekeeper. Obviously the reason why you say no a lot of the time is because you think stuff isn't very good.

CA: No, no that's not it at all. Again, I spend literally half my time doing web stuff, and I'm an active blogger, and I wouldn't say the quality is worse, it is different. I hate the word gatekeeper. I hate being a gatekeeper. I have to be a gatekeeper, but I hate it. I feel I am bad at it, like everybody is. I don't know what people want. I can't guess at all the various interests out there. I don't know what is going to resonate six months from now, three months from now, I am guessing like everybody else. I guess better than some or I wouldn't have my job, but it is still guessing, I feel uncomfortable about that.  But that is what that medium requires; that I control the horizontal, I control the vertical, I decide what is going to be on the cover. Online of course, we do just the opposite. The marketplace sorts it out. We throw it all out there and the reader s decide what's popular and we can measure that. I think that the virtue of me having that editor-in-chief role in print, is that we get to spend a lot of time packaging, and thinking beyond the news cycle to really do what money and time allows, which is deep research and thoughtful combining of narrative long form journalism, design, photography, infographics, etc. A book takes that to an even further level. Meanwhile on the web, it is difficult to do 8000 word stories on the web, its not the right medium for that. It is difficult to integrate design, photography and words on the web. You don't have time to do thoughtful--you know I did 6 months of research and an army of researchers doing infographics-but what you can do is participate in a conversation that exists outside of your own walls. You can respond very quickly, you can add value in small chunks, not large ones. You can have a  quite casual voice. They are both good. I find myself literally straddling that divide.

IB: One of the ways we have always determined value in an economy of scarcity is through price. We establish a price on, that establishes a value. How do you establish value, how do you establish what is good in a free economy when we don' t have that mechanism?

CA: That's going to be one of the themes of the book. Economics is largely defined as the science of choice under scarcity. It is largely defined by monetary measures, money. What we are realizing is that our culture is driven by more than money. You know the rise of the so-called "gift economy;" the wikipedias and blogospheres etc. shows that there are other incentives that will encourage people to contribute: attention, reputation, expression, things like that. When you just look at things like attention, which you can measure simply as traffic or readership, and reputation, which you measure in terms of incoming links, or Google page or things like that…these have monetary-like characteristics. You can measure them. There does seem to be, on some level, kind of limited amount of attention, reputation in the world that we redistribute, and you know you compete for that. And so you can sort of extend economics to include attention economics and reputation economics, it's an even more dismal science than monetary economics but it is something that we are starting to do and it is going to be featured in my book.

IB: But attention economics, if you are talking about websites for example, and I 've seen you talk about how influential some sites are, much more influential than the Chicago Tribune and what not because they get a lot of attention, but again I guess I come back to this issue of quality. How do we know what is good and what is bad. I mean, just because something gets a lot of attention, there is a value to that but it is not the value we traditionally put on things?

CA: I have a real problem with the word quality. I never use it in the sense that you just did. And I'll tell you why. I'll give you a story. So you talk to television executives about YouTube and they're like, "pshh the quality is appalling. You've seen the lighting, and the camera work, and the acting and the screenwriting, and it is 3 minutes shot with a webcam." Then you ask my children about quality. My children love Star Wars, and just this last weekend we gave them a choice. Would you like to watch Star Wars DVD on the projector, the hi def projector, wall-size thing, surround sound the whole thing. Or do you want go to YouTube and watch Lego Star Wars stopmotion animation created by nine year olds. And you can guess what the answer is. Of course they wanted to go to YouTube and watch Lego stop-motion animation created by nine year olds. What does Hollywood say about that? What does quality mean when they would rather watch the crappiest little animation made by kids than the pinnacle of Hollywood special effects on a theatre-like projection system. And the answer is quality is in the eye of the beholder. Quality is more about relevance than it is about production quality. Your quality is not my quality. And I don't think you can suggest that there is a universal standard of quality.

IB: As a magazine editor, how do you determine what is a quality magazine and what is not a quality magazine?

CA: I subscribe to magazines on robotics that by your definition of quality would probably be the crappiest thing you ever saw. And I give them as much attention as I do Vanity Fair. Quality is in the eye of the beholder, and the marketplace decides. If people like it, if people see that it has value, then that's quality and I don't care what it looks like.