The "Pro-Am" Revolution

One of the big difference between the head and the tail of producers is that the further you are in the tail the more likely you are to have to keep your day job. And that's okay. The distinction between "professional" producers and "amateurs" is blurring and may in fact be ultimately irrelevant.  We make not just what we're paid to make, but also what we want to make. Both can have value. Once, with high barriers to marketplace entry, only the professional work found an audience. But now those barriers are dropping.

Bloggers are perhaps the most obvious example; is anyone really paying the rent with Adsense alone? And yet 8 million Americans have created their own blog, according to a new Pew Internet survey. There are loads of other examples, from open source software contributors to homebrew remix artists.  Demos, a UK think tank, has written a great report on the "Pro-Am" phenomenon, which they summarize as follows (if you have trouble loading the pdf from your browser, as I did, save it to your desktop and doubleclick that):

From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy. For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations. The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it. The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought. Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse range of Pro-Ams and containing new data about the extent of Pro-Am activity in the UK, this report proposes new policies to support and encourage valuable Pro-Am activity.

Comments

[Mike G]

I agree with what you say and yet even there I think the distinctions are less than they seem at first. Charles Krauthammer (to pick one at random) has a nationally syndicated column and yet I bet he feels he couldn't afford life in DC, that school the kids go to, etc., on his column income alone-- he's glad for the speaker fees, scale for TV appearances, book advances, whatever. And from there you go to somebody like Stanley Bing, who has a steady gig and a big corporate day job which is surely his main source of income; and from there to somebody who has a day job and a less well paying steady gig (but can nevertheless say they're a professional, based on where that gig is), and so on. What's the difference between the professional writers on that continuum and a blogger? They're all patching together a living out of multiple sources and using their writing in multiple areas to advance their names and marketability (and influence and policy positions). Or to put it another way, my first and last book came out eight years ago. Am I still a professional, or am I a pajama-clad nobody commenting in a comments section? Where's the judge who rules on that?

Ultimately, in the Internet era professional journalist is sort of like "professional first-time novelist." We're all amateurs until we have readers, and more professional the more of them we have-- and how we get them is pretty irrelevant.

[Joshua Wood]

Chris,

I just wanted to thank you for the link to my blog at long-tail-marketing.blogspot.com.

[Oli]

David Brin's been banging on about this sort of stuff for a while -- there was stuff on the Age of the Amateur in "The Transparent Society" well before the dawn of the blog. Can't see a specific reference, but there's probably a relevant essay or two at his site.
The Demos report, FWIW, was by Charles Leadbetter.

[James Governor]

it goes further. content owners have NO CHOICE but to get "amateurs" to provide the metadata required to enable long tail models.

for some reason my entry wouldnt trackback but...

"The digitized world will require an awful lot of tending (garden metaphor), categorizing and indexing (library metaphor). Who will do that? Amateurs, professionals or pro-ams. No company is going to be able to afford to hire enough gardeners or librarians to do the work. That is why enterprise haves no choice but to encourage participation. You won't be able to digititize and usefully annotate your own data; there is just too much of it and more being generated all the time. Its like fast food-customers pay restaurants to clean up their own trash after they eat.

Successful business models will be built on seeing us not as consumers but as metadata creators. One term i dont really like but which has some currency in this regard is prosumer."

from Software Development Meets The Long Tail
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000365.html

[timv]

Someone (wish I could find the exact quote and attribution) once defined being a professional as doing what you love to do, even at those times when you'd rather be doing something else.

Maybe orthogonal to this discussion, but to me amateur means being able to say, "Not today, I'm not in the mood." When you've made the commitment--either to someone else or to your own finances--to deliver some product on a certain schedule, you aren't an amateur any longer.

And yes, I know this means that college basketball players aren't amateurs. Not by any stretch of the imagination...

[Doug Stone]

The poster child for me in the pro-am arena is the backyard astronomer. With lots of time available to him or her, image processing software, and internet connections to large telescopes and cpu's, these are no longer amateurs. My favorite book on the subject is Tim Ferris' Seeing In the Dark - How backyard astronmers are probing deep space and guarding earth from interplanetary peril. www.timothyferris.com/sid.html

[David George]

Sorry to comment on this a long time after the event.

I consider myself one of the band of pro-ams. My website covering backcountry skiing in France had around 1.5 million page views over the last 12 months. With Adsense and Affliate Advertising this meant I could work on it full time with a supplement from other writing (by work that means 60 days spent in the mountains - well someone has to do it, sigh). The information is now extensively used by other mainstream media sources trying to understand some high profile incidents in the mountains.

At the same time professional bodies are still taking a hands-off approach although the reality of visitor numbers and a large international audience are beginning to garner interest, even in Old Europe.

[Aurelius Tjin]

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