“‘You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!’ has never been much of a business model.” There, in one sentence, Clay Shirky sums up the “newspaper problem.” His is the single best piece of media analysis in a very long while.
When the developed world has had access to the global copy-making machine that is the internet for more than 15 years one has to wonder why it took this long to kill the newspaper. And why we didn’t see it coming all along. It’ll probably take another five years or so to finish the job, but it’s safe to say the internet has blown up all forms of corporate media. Any medium that relied on intellectual property laws, monopolistic structures, or inefficiencies hidden by economies of scale are over. Stick a fork in them; they’re done. What Shirky calls the “unthinkable scenario” is here and it’s not going away.
As a result, Shirky says we’re living through the 1500s and the spread of Gutenberg’s movable type all over again. Many experiments flourished during the time, almost all of which seemed trivial to contemporaries. But Shirky focuses on one of these seemingly trivial experiments that, in retrospect, turned out to be an enormous leap forward.
“Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change—take a book and shrink it—was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.”
Think of Craig Newmark as a modern Aldus Manutius. Craigslist began as a tiny experiment that yielded industry-shifting changes.
And this is exactly what must happen now. Millions of Craig Newmarks with millions of seemingly small ideas. Some of them will grow into sustainable, thriving media models.
Instead of encouraging and nurturing the experimenters and the experiments, Shirky argues that we’re demanding lies embedded in the question we ask:
“When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.”
The question isn’t how we’re going to save newspapers or replace them. The question we need to be asking is seemingly similar but vastly different: How do we go about strengthening journalism?
Update: Saturday, 14 March 2009 05:09PM CDT: For a glimpse—just a glimpse; a whisper in the wind—of why we don’t need newspapers, take a gander at Alessandra Stanley’s attempted deconstruction of Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer in today’s New York Times. Your first clue would be how Stanely (and the Times) treats the interview not as news but as entertainment.
“Mostly, the much-hyped Thursday night showdown between the comedian Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer, the mercurial host of ‘Mad Money’ on CNBC, felt like a Senate subcommittee hearing,” writes Stanley. “Mr. Stewart treated his guest like a C.E.O. subpoenaed to testify before congress: his point was not to hear Mr. Cramer out, but to act out a cathartic ritual of indignation and castigation.” Hyperbole much, Allesandra? She later refers to Stewart as “the Democratic senator from Comedy Central” who “has always had a messianic streak to his political satire.”
Yes, of course, the Daily Show is comedy and entertainment. But what’s newsworthy is that in this single interview, Jon Stewart became the second best journalist in the US. Stanley’s failed deconstruction fails precisely because she doesn’t understand what a journalist’s job is. That Stewart’s complete takedown of Cramer happened on an entertainment television show is of no consequence. We’ll take our news where we can get it. Get over yourselves.
Stanley goes on to write, “There isn’t enough regulation on Wall Street, and there’s hardly any accountability on cable news: It’s a 24-hour star system in which opinions—and showmanship—matter more than facts. Two words, Alessandra; just two words: Judith Miller.
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