- Share This Post
- submit
- 14
-
Sparkle (0)
Earlier this month, I confessed my confusion over the changes happening in the news industry. This weekend, Clay Shirky fired off a blog post that said what everyone has been afraid to say: we are now at the dawn of a post-print revolution. Newspapers can't be saved because they are tied to economic and technological models that aren't viable any more. Here's an excerpt:
We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
Shirky's words are ricocheting across the social media universe.
Just as Marshall Mc Luhan said the medium was the message, Maria Langer parsed the meaning of the means by which she was drawn to Shirky's post. She followed a link from a twitter message and:
I found myself on a plain vanilla — indeed, default WordPress template — blog page with a long column of full-justified text just large enough to read without putting on my cheaters. It was unbroken by advertising (including unattractive or animated ads featuring jiggling fat bodies), images (including meaningless stock photos, inserted as eye candy), or even subheadings (used by so many writers, including me, to help the reader skip head to the “important” parts). It was pure content with only a trio of centered asterisks to indicate a shift in the author’s thought.
And it was good.
What, exactly, is good about Shirky's argument? Index//MB extracts this point:
Clay Shirky distinguishes between journalism and newspapers; their interests are intertwined but the two are about to be separated forever. Journalism is the act. Newspapers are the artifact. The infrastructure around the artifact is imploding, never to be replaced.
MB argues that what Shirky is saying about newspapers and magazines pretty much applies to books, too.
Jessica Lipnack brings Shirky's point home:
[R]egardless of how the information reaches us, we need journalism, even if we don't know precisely what vehicle will deliver it in the years to come.
A lot of people are quoting extensively from Shirky's post on their own blogs. Gaby Benkwitz is one of them, because, as she put it:
[T]hat’s what people do nowadays and the author is cool with it (over 130 people wordlwide have done the same so far and therefore spread his word, drawing attention to him and his work).
What does all of this mean for those of us who have devoted our life's work to this industry. Blogher CE Susan Mernit has an answer:
Right this very minute, old media paradigms are dying. Change faster, people!
Change how? Shirky says it's time for a lot more experimentation. Mediavidea has a list of 14 emerging business models, ranging from foundation-funded ventures such as Pro Publica to "crowd-funded" efforts such as Spot.us.
For my own part, I think Shirky's right about the fate of newspapers, and he is right about the need for journalism. His separation of newspapers from journalism adds perspective to results of a recent Pew Center poll's findings that fully one-half to two-thirds of all Americans say that if their daily newspaper disappeared, they wouldn't care. They might not miss the newspaper, but they will still seek out the news.
We are at the dawn of a new era of civic media. While we don't know exactly what that new media economy will look like, one thing is certain. It's too important to be left to the experts alone.
