The Wisdom of Clay Shirky

Sunday, 29th March 2009

I've long been an acolyte of US new media guru Clay Shirky. His book Here Comes Everybody is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the media and the future of... well, let's just say the future.

One of my students (thanks Alex) has just alerted me to these thoughts, entitled, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, on the future of the industry I have worked in for most of my professional life. It's a long piece (so much for the web encouraging bite-sized chunks of information) and some of it is very technical. But this passage struck me as wise:

"The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses."This past year has changed everything. No one now assumes the old newspaper model will survive. Least of all editors and proprietors of newspapers, who seem to have run out of ideas.

Filed under: Clay Shirky (1 more articles) , Internet (80 more articles) , Newspapers (360 more articles) , Unemployment (86 more articles)

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Dixon

March 29th, 2009 1:43pm Report this comment

GOOD!!!

As someone personally villified in a tabloid, "exposed" for actions I did not commit, "quoted" as saying exactly the opposite of what I clearly say in a conversation of which I have a recording, and "set-up" by the most provocative means, I can only say the world will be a cleaner place when all such scum has ceased to exist. The sooner we see the back of newspapers the better.

Andrew Zalotocky

March 29th, 2009 2:08pm Report this comment

Until recently a newspaper had to be "a general-purpose vehicle" to appeal to the widest possible audience, because moving all that paper around is so expensive. But it meant that the reader effectively had to buy a whole basket of unrelated products in order to get the bits that he or she actually wanted.

The Internet provides a new method of distribution that makes all that unnecessary. It has also vastly increased the number of information vendors competing with every section of the newspaper. Why buy a paper for sport or fashion when you can visit thousands of specialist web sites dedicated to the topic?

But the most obsolete part of a newspaper is the opinion section. The "general-purpose vehicle" model requires columnists to be generalists, which means that much of what they write will be about things they don't have any real expertise in. But why bother reading the views of a partially informed generalist when you can just as easily go online and get the views of real experts on the subject? The fact that some columnists still get paid huge salaries is just madness.

The only thing that newspapers can still be competitive at is hard news gathering. There are stories you can only get if you have the insider access that established publications enjoy, or the financial resources to conduct in-depth investigations. There are also stories that amateurs can't get because there are too many legal or physical dangers involved in reporting them.

That's the USP for newspapers. If they want to survive they should ditch everything else and focus all their resources on news gathering. They should also ditch the print edition as dead tree distribution is no longer economically viable. If readers still want something paper-like, sell them a branded e-book reader and promote it as the eco-friendly choice.

elixelx

March 30th, 2009 8:09am Report this comment

If this man, Shirky, had written this boilerplate in 1992, it would today seem prescient. But he didn't!
The fact that it was published in March 2008 just makes it--boilerplate!
What worries me, Martin, and explains the current agony of newspapers, is that people like you, who have worked with ink and paper all your lives, WOULD SEE THIS CLICHE-RIDDLED HINDSIGHT as somehow prophetic! My paperboy told me this in 2001, at the same time he was given notice that he would be doing one round, not three! But then my paperboy was incapable of writing a book which would be perceived as wisdom by the very same moribund hacks whose death it was predicting.
Maybe what is dying is not the newspapers but NEWSPAPERPEOPLE!
Marshall McLuhan, he ain't!