“‘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.
