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Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Clay Shirky
… The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed.
… In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.)
… Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however.
… 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.
… Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
… [The transition to print via the printing press] is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
… 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.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
… Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
… 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.
(13 March 2009)
The best analysis I’ve see of what is happening to newspapers. -BA
Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day
Asher Moses, Sydney Morning Herald
The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.
Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark’s list of banned websites.
The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA – an anti-abortion website.
… Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government’s censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.
“The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship,” Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban.
(17 March 2009)
Recommended by Big Gav at Peak Energy who writes:
The SMH has a report on the latest attack on freedom of information in Australia, noting the bureaucrats / Stalinist losers in charge of censoring information now want to impose massive fines on those who publish links to sites on their list of blacklisted internet sites – Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day. Hopefully Cryptome has (or soon will) publish the list so the world can have a good laugh at these guys. When the next election comes around remember I’m recommending you vote against the government.
There is no bigger issue than net censorship
Guy Rundle, Crikey, (Australia)
With the news that communications watchdog ACMA has put some pages of Wikileaks on its list of banned links — and threatened linkers with five-figure daily fines — the fight against the compulsory internet filtering enters a new and vital stage.
Wikileaks — the document repository, no association with Wikipedia — has published the list of sites banned by the Danish government, and these pages have been put on the blacklist, presumably as part of a worldwide compact, formal or otherwise, between national web censorship authorities.
Of course, the ACMA decision doesn’t affect many people at the moment, only sites hosted from Australia. But should mandatory filtering be introduced, the pages would be blocked for everyone. As would the pages telling you which pages had been blocked. And the pages telling you the pages that tell you the … and so on, a repressive tower.
Such a move should make crystal clear to everyone, what has always been obvious to anyone paying attention — that Conroy’s filter proposal represents the greatest assault on free speech and an open society in the country’s history
(18 March 2009)
Recommended by Big Gav who summarizes it thusly: “it is the most important issue in Australian politics today, recommending the left and the libertarians co-operate for a change to defeat it.”
The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers
John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney, The Nation
Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States.
After years of neglecting signs of trouble, elite opinion-makers have begun in recent months to recognize that things have gone horribly awry.
… The Internet and blogosphere, too, depend in large part on “old media” to do original journalism. Web links still refer readers mostly to stories that first appeared in print. Even in more optimistic scenarios, no one has a business model to sustain digital journalism beyond a small number of self-supporting services. The attempts of newspapers to shift their operations online have been commercial failures, as they trade old media dollars for new media pennies. We are enthusiastic about Wikipedia and the potential for collaborative efforts on the web; they can help democratize our media and politics. But they do not replace skilled journalists on the ground covering the events of the day and doing investigative reporting. Indeed, the Internet cannot achieve its revolutionary potential as a citizens’ forum without such journalism.
So this is where we stand: much of local and state government, whole federal departments and agencies, American activities around the world, the world itself–vast areas of great public concern–are either neglected or on the verge of neglect.
… The old corporate media system choked on its own excess. We should not seek to restore or re-create it. We have to move forward to a system that creates a journalism far superior to that of the recent past.
We can do exactly that–but only if we recognize and embrace the necessity of government intervention. Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism. We understand that this is a controversial position.
… The place to begin crafting solutions is with the understanding that the economic downturn did not cause the crisis in journalism; nor did the Internet. The economic collapse and Internet have greatly accentuated and accelerated a process that can be traced back to the 1970s, when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off. It was then that managers began to balance their books and to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus. Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-size American city in the 1960s, and you will be awed by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which “outsiders”–civil rights campaigners, antiwar activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader–ended up on the front page.
… We have to ask where we want to end up, after the reforms have been implemented. In our view we need to have competing independent newsrooms of well-paid journalists in every state and in every major community. This is not about newspapers or even broadcast media; it entails all media and accepts that we may be headed into an era when nearly all of our communication will be digital. Ideally this will be a pluralistic system, where there will be different institutional structures. Varieties of nonprofit media will have to play a much larger role, though not a monopolistic one.
We recognize and embrace the need for a system in which there will be a range of perspectives from left to right, alongside some media more intent on maintaining a less explicitly ideological stance.
John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney were the founders, with Josh Silver, of Free Press, which has launched a campaign to save the news. Their book, Saving Journalism: The Soul of Democracy, will be published by New Press in the fall.
(18 March 2009)
Just added this item late in the day, March 20. -BA
Newspaper cuts open door to more political trickery
James Rainey, Los Angeles Times
Political consultants aren’t exactly rubbing their hands together and snickering. But as the hired guns look over a landscape of closing newspapers and laid-off investigative reporters, they sense an opening that leaves them both excited and queasy.
… “Imagine driving along [Interstate] 5. There used to be a couple highway patrolmen to keep people in line. Now they’re gone and everyone knows it,” said Chris Lehane, a veteran Democratic consultant. “It can devolve into a Mad Max situation pretty quickly.”
The diminution of mainstream news outlets and constant attacks on their credibility leave us confused about where to turn for information about our leaders, agreed Dan Schnur, a one-time Republican consultant who directs USC’s Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics.
… Here’s hoping the new websites and community blogs that we keep hearing about will pick up the slack some time soon. In the meantime, the political pros have more control. And we have less information. Some folks seem to have no idea what they’re missing.
“If you ask people, ‘Do you want state troopers on the road?’ they might first answer, ‘No’ ,” said Lehane. “But if they projected it long term, they would have to wonder, ‘What does that mean to society?’ “
(20 March 2009)
