The Crowd Will Create Its Own Meritocracy

By Ron Hogan on October 9, 2008 8:00 AM

mediabistro.com’s “So What Do You Do?” series offers a conversation with Jeff Howe, the Wired editor who’s written the book (and the blog) on “crowdsourcing,” which is a concise way of saying “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” (We’ve dropped the term into our posts from time to time, when we see the phenomenon in action.)

How might this trend affect authors? “Ken Auletta is not going out of business anytime soon, and neither is Malcolm Gladwell or Sebastian Junger,” Howe says. “I think top talent will always enjoy a market, and nothing that has happened as of now to telegraph that they’re in trouble… The fact is that the aesthetic quality of what’s being produced by professionals; that mid-range mid-market kind of stuff wasn’t very good anyway.” But passionate amateurs are already doing a better job at certain types of writing and reporting than “accredited professionals,” which sometimes results in them getting hired to replace the lousiest professional writers… or, as Howe puts it, “we have found this amazing new way to discover people who should be professionals.” Sure, the examples Howe cites are primarily from the world of journalism, but we’ve already seen publishers like Simon and Schuster and Penguin Group relying on a community of online readers to select novelists to offer book deals, and then there was Avon Books‘s crowd-written romance story two years back… and, although we’re getting a bit tangential here, the clamoring of fans in the comments section of John Scalzi‘s blog led to the restoration to print of Barry Hughart‘s fantasy novels. If you think about it, isn’t that like crowdsourcing market research?