An obituary for newspapers
Clay Shirky expresses some very powerful ideas about the demise of newspapers and traditional publishing [Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable at Clay Shirky]:
Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
[Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pm]
The main thesis of the article is that the business models underlying print-based news are completely unsustainable, and newspapers are being kept alive solely by institutional inertia.
Shirky notes that the new content production models visible at the moment involve unremunerated writing and publishing produced by loose collections of enthusiastic amateurs:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
[Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 9:22 pm]
The new model of journalism seems to have some worrying characteristics. Investigative journalism in the Woodward and Bernstein mould may be an idealistic model, but it was possible because of resources which might only be available to large institutions: teams of lawyers, a newspaper’s own political weight, institutional access to data etc. Investigations into the activities of large transnational bodies need to be supported by the tactical resources enabling them to withstand legal, financial and paramilitary defense mechanisms. It seems hopelessly romantic to imagine that networks of enthusiastic amateurs could achieve what the ideal models of investigative journalism seem to achieve. The new models look capable of producing vast amounts of shallow scrutiny, but they risk disabling the kinds of journalism that gave journalism what good name it has.
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