Depends on the nature of the revolution. This one's not political but economic, and not quite economic. It's a horse'n-buggy revolution, in which one technology overpowers another. It's not so much an inverse perception; it's McLuhanesque - viewing the present through a rearview mirror, meaning that when we can't see clearly ahead, we suffer a loss of direction. Those are revolutions that simply must sort themselves out. They can't be lead, only followed, which is to say, wait-and-see what the Long Tail will wag.
This link has been bookmarked by 646 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Mar 2009, by Tracy Viselli.
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04 May 12
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ne of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days
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Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think
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hey 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.
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Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyon
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23 Apr 12
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unthinkable
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The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopul
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The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this:
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27 Feb 12
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26 Feb 12
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I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
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Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
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answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
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That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place
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The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it
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17 Oct 11
Andy TeddThe 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.
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27 Aug 11
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They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it
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The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow
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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
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was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift
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The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place
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So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
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the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
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26 Aug 11
citizenwaldseminal essay on why newspapers screwed up in the internet age: thought they could apply old models, people's behaviors would change.
NB closes with useful reference to Eisenstein and history; then the fact we don't need the newspaper: we need journalism.periodicals press newspapers journalism Printing book_history digitization new_media
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24 Aug 11
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21 Jul 11
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That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.
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10 Jul 11
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15 Jun 11
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29 May 11
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12 May 11
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21 Mar 11
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One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
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One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
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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.
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“How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
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That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.
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If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
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Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
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20 Mar 11
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22 Feb 11
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02 Feb 11
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20 Jan 11
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18 Jan 11
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14 Jan 11
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That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.
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04 Jan 11
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19 Dec 10
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03 Dec 10
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13 Nov 10
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09 Nov 10
Kurt HeinrichAnnotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable
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(Micropayments work only where the provider can avoid competitive business models.
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01 Nov 10
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20 Oct 10
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“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
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21 Sep 10
brent lawrenceEssay by Clay Shirky about the demise of print media and the rise of electronic media
newspapers journalism media publishing future shirky Technology printing clay shirky shirky.com
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17 Aug 10
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12 Aug 10
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24 Jul 10
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06 Jul 10
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Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
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01 Jul 10
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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.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
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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.
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29 Jun 10
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08 Jun 10
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07 Jun 10
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26 May 10
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20 May 10
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26 Apr 10
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23 Apr 10
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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. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
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14 Apr 10
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12 Apr 10
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09 Apr 10
pedro_daltroThat is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.
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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.
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Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press.
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That 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. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing.
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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.
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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.
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02 Apr 10
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26 Mar 10
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“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
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The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming
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to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet
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to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law
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New payment models such as micropayments
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they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported
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ech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal.
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the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them
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The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow
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People would resist being educated to act against their own desires
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Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online
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erocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.)
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Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies
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suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off
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Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception
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When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based
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the real world increasingly resembled the unthinkable scenario
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all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”
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Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible
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Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church
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As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think
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That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place
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“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments
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Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism
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18 Mar 10
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15 Mar 10
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24 Feb 10
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20 Feb 10
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09 Feb 10
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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.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
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21 Jan 10
Ryan MurphyI remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
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18 Jan 10
gwenimSearch "Clay Shirky"
Clay Shirky blogged newspapers journalism media publishing future Technology
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And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
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There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
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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.
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That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.
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Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
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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.
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Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues.
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07 Jan 10
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05 Jan 10
Alexander VießJetzt schon legendärer Text wider Paywalls bei journalistischen Onlineangeboten
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30 Dec 09
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14 Dec 09
Francois NelShirkey weighs what ails the publishing industry (and its value proposition) - and considers lessons from Gutenborg.
Shirkey revolution Publishing Gutenborg Eisenstein BusinessModels
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07 Dec 09
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Add Sticky NoteRevolutions create a curious inversion of perception.
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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.
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05 Dec 09
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01 Dec 09
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29 Nov 09
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18 Nov 09
Howard Rheingold"Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500?
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The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think.
If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — tak-
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.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
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. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
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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.
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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.
-
What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
-
Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
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During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. 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, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
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And so it is today. 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.
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If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.
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For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.
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The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
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o who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.
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Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.
In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
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Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
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We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
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.
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09 Nov 09
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08 Nov 09
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07 Nov 09
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24 Oct 09
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12 Oct 09
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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.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
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09 Oct 09
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06 Oct 09
Tara HuntThe 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 wa
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02 Oct 09
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27 Sep 09
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25 Sep 09
Heinz WittenbrinkEiner der lesenswertesten Beiträge zur Zeitungskrise. Shirky darüber, welche Zukunft Zeitungen im Netz haben: keine.
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24 Sep 09
Jennifer JarrattShirky's analysis of the end of the newspaper model-creative destruction, possibly
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richard sambrookClay SHirkys 2008 post: "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."
cshirkynews newspapers journalism digital internet future futureofnews USA socialmedia
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23 Sep 09
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21 Sep 09
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