Above you’ll find Clay Shirky’s excellent TED talk about Twitter, social media and the Internet and how these technologies have forever changed media.

“As recently as last decade, most of the media that was available for public consumption was produced by professionals,” Shirky said in the video. “Those days are over, never to return.”

The biggest take away from this excellent talk is that consumers are now also producers. The same tools that allow us to consume a variety of content on the Internet — text, photos, video, etc — also allow us to produce that content. It is both easier to consume content than ever before and also easier to produce content.

“Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape, a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment — phones, computers — lets you consume and produce,” Shirky said. “It’s as if you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free.”

This presents a fundamental challenge for content producers. Content producers must find a way to add value in a world with ever increasing producers of content. Anyone with a computer or a mobile phone can be a content producer.

Rather than belittle so-called citizen journalists, professional content producers need to find a way to work with, not against amateur producers. I think there are several ways to do this:

1. Curation — The biggest problem with citizen journalism is not that no one will report for free, but rather that so many people are willing to report on the world around them. There simply is a glut of information. Professional curation suddenly becomes a valuable commodity. Is Andrew Sullivan reporting live from Iran? No, but he is providing excellent curation of what is happening over there. There is a real need for knowledgeable and patient people to sift through all of this citizen media and pick out the best of it.
2. Analysis — Citizen journalism is all about micro details, but it’s poor at providing a macro view of a situation. Professional journalists are in a much better position to look at citizen journalism from above, combine what they see there from professional reports and provide macro analysis.
3. Trends — Citizen journalism is much better at providing the details of crime in a neighborhood , but citizen journalism isn’t very good at identifying trends in data. Citizen journalists can provide the on-the-ground details (with help from pros from time to time), while professional journalists spend most of their time identifying trends.

Shirky also points out that social media is not just a place to report information, but also a place to discuss what is happening.

Social media, the Internet, computers, cell phones, etc are not going away. Rather than bemoan these changes, content producers need to figure out ways to thrive in this new reality.

“Media is increasingly less just as source of information, it’s increasingly a site of coordination,” he said. “Groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well.”