Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky - The Diigo Meta page

• 07 Dec 09
  

  jeff shear
  • Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception.

    • 

      jeff shear about 16 hours ago

      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.
  • 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.
• 05 Dec 09
  

  Jon Morgan
• 01 Dec 09
  

  Novica Nakov

  newmedia newspapers publishing internet bussines journalism

• 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?
  1
  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

  literacy

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 12 more annotations...

  • • 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?
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

    • 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.

• 09 Nov 09
  

  douggraves Graves

  newspapers journalism future shirky publishing printing Technology

• 07 Nov 09
  

  Jorge Islas

  newspapers journalism media future publishing

• 24 Oct 09
  

  Craig Nansen

  2009Bookmarks

• 12 Oct 09
  

  Royce Tan

  • 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.

    
    

• 09 Oct 09
  

  Lia Hadley

  read media teachers TED

• 02 Oct 09
  

  Takuya Homma

  Publishing

• 01 Oct 09
  

  Amr Gharbeia

  newspapers journalism media

• 27 Sep 09
  

  Takuya Homma
• 25 Sep 09
  

  Heinz Wittenbrink

  Einer der lesenswertesten Beiträge zur Zeitungskrise. Shirky darüber, welche Zukunft Zeitungen im Netz haben: keine.

  by:ClayShirky online-journalismus zeitungskrise

• 24 Sep 09
  

  Ognjen Strpić

  news books publishing economics history technology cshirky

• 21 Sep 09
  

  Peter Welter

  Social Media

• 27 Aug 09
  

  Emily Vickery

  newspapers culture trends future shirky

• 24 Aug 09
  

  Phil Ashman

  technology

• 01 Aug 09
  

  Margolis Margolis

  research media internet journalism

  • 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.
• 27 Jul 09
  

  Ed Buclatin

  A great article on the affect the internet has had on traditional media model, especially the newspaper industry.

  socialmedia traditionalmedia article journalism media business internet newspapers sharing 5stars

• 26 Jul 09
  

  Jason K

  newspapers journalism media

• 18 Jul 09
  

  julius beezer

  future journalism media newspapers

• 14 Jul 09
  

  anja c. wagner

  Zum Niedergang der Zeitungen

  medien struktur change kultur future

• 06 Jul 09
  

  Margie Borschke

  arts1091

• 30 Jun 09
  

  Nate Otto
• 22 Jun 09
  

  mat Wall-Smith

  arts1091 newspapers journalism

• 12 Jun 09
  

  Alexandre Enkerli
  • That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.

    • 

      Alexandre Enkerli on 2009-06-12

      Almost relativistic as an approach. Reification and naturalization are social processes.
• 11 Jun 09
  

  Jeppe Kabell

  journalism newspapers media internet technology business history news

• 09 Jun 09
  

  Alexandre Enkerli
  • do whatever works

    • 

      Alexandre Enkerli on 2009-06-12

      Who was talking about pragmatists? Is the debate with ethicists?
  • Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers
• 01 Jun 09
  

  william doust

  erosion of control of content of national newspapers and paid media ;-) from the Msater blaster. Clay Shirky, author of "here comes everybody"

  newspapers publishing media future for:rachyjohnstone

  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
• 28 May 09
  

  Vic Hannon

  journalism shirky newspapers

  • 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 everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers.
  • The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole.
• 25 May 09
  

  drkataja1

  media

• 23 May 09
  

  Gene Roche

  future

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
    • 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.
• 15 May 09
  

  Max Ugaz

  Recomendado en conferencia de Siemens sobre Future Course Models.

• 13 May 09
  

  Ant Heald

  future change publishing newspapers journalism shift

• 

  Tom Krieglstein

  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.

  journalism writing newmedia clayshirky newspapers media history blogging printingpress publishing printing

  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • 16 more annotations...
  • • uing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
    • Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception.
    • When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
    • Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
    • “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
    • The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.
    • 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.
    • “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
    • We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.
    • “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.
    • Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
    • 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.
    • We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is
• 

  ddelorme
• 11 May 09
  

  John Graney

  newspapers innovation

• 10 May 09
  

  Patrick Henry
• 04 May 09
  

  Ching Fung

  Blogosphere

  • “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.”
  • 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.
  • 10 more annotations...
  • • 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.
    • There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
    • 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.
    • o describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play
    • they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution.
    • hey 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.
    • Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
• 01 May 09
  

  jenholt13
• 

  Brooke Lester

  What if we replace "newspapers" and "printing presses" with "higher ed" and "universities"?
  http://www.utne.com/Media/Newspapers-Save-Society-Publishing-Future.aspx
  http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html

  culture change academia internet media

  • Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments
• 27 Apr 09
  

  Mario A Núñez
  • 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.
• 24 Apr 09
  

  Rob Reynolds

  Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shirky.com%2Fweblog%2F2009%2F03%2Fnewspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable

  newspapers future

  • 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.
  • carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution
• 23 Apr 09
  

  Jeff Steely

  journalism newspapers internet Business technology News fromdelicious2009-04

• 

  david corts
• 

  case black

  ********

  Article

• 22 Apr 09
  

  paul lowe

  Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
  
  Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including 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.
  
  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.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

  newspapers journalism media future publishing shirky printing unthinkable online_journalism

• 21 Apr 09
  

  Mark Bonchek

  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? 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 — take a

  printing press

• 18 Apr 09
  

  Tod Baker
  • newspapers
  • newspapers
  • 8 more annotations...
  • • newspapers
    • newspapers
    • newspapers
    • newspapers
    • newspapers
    • When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers,

      • 

        Tod Baker on 2009-04-18

        When teachers demand to know how we are going to replace the sage-on-the-stage approach to teaching, they are...
      • 

        Eric Turner on 2009-04-24

        When will teachers realize they need to get on board with technology before they become irrelevant...much like newspapers? It's pointless to have IT offices in schools and districts if teachers aren't strongly encouraged to use them.
    • newspapers
    • 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. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.
• 17 Apr 09
  

  Justin Medved

  essential reading

  for:dharter for:rtrevorwoods for:mdil newspapers journalism future media

  • 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. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
• 14 Apr 09
  

  stan mag

  Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
  
  Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including 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.
  
  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.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
  
  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.
  
  As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work bet

  shirky

• 12 Apr 09
  

  Tania Sheko

  Clay Shirky's blog post about newspapers, change and writing in the 21st century

  newspapers journalism media future publishing shirky printing unthinkable

• 10 Apr 09
  

  Jordan Kent

  journalism newspaper newspapers publishing copyright

• 

  William Hoch

  newspapers journalism media future publishing

  • 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.
• 09 Apr 09
  

  dean groom
• 08 Apr 09
  

  leigh Murrell
  • 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.
• 

  skip zalneraitis

  newspapers journalism media future publishing shirky printing unthinkable

• 07 Apr 09
  

  Benjamin Blackmer

  This has been getting a lot of links lately. Long, but interesting.

• 

  Matt Clausen

  collapse of traditional information economies

  journalism media future publishing transforming_society TransformingEducation presentations

• 

  Chris Selland

  newspapers journalism

• 05 Apr 09
  

  Jeff Utecht

  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.

  newspapers journalism media shirky

• 

  Gary Burge

  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 dem

  ClayShirky newspapers Guttenberg futures

• 03 Apr 09
  

  chris castiglione
• 01 Apr 09
  

  Dean Shareski

  Shirky's thoughtful post on the revolutional change related to newspapers

  newspapers publishing culture media change

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  spofdamon
• 31 Mar 09
  

  Pam Sykes
  • 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.
  • That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental
  • 1 more annotations...

  • • 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.

• 

  Gary Ritzenthaler

  Great essay from Shirky on newspapers and changes in culture.

  2009 blogpost clayshirky journalism media newspapers technology history culture

• 

  alisa perren

  newspapers journalism publishing printing

• 30 Mar 09
  

  Kevin Creamer
• 

  tony curzon price

  When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. 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.

  newspapers journalism

  • Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.)
  • Micropayments work only where the provider can avoid competitive business models.
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  • • Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
• 29 Mar 09
  

  Brad Graham

  newspaper

• 

  julianna07 julianna07

  journalism

• 28 Mar 09
  

  Isabelle Jones

  media 21stcenturyskills future reference

• 27 Mar 09
  

  Josh Hogan

  journalism media

  • The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming.
  • during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several
  • 5 more annotations...
  • • In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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!”
    • 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.
• 26 Mar 09
  

  Lars Sætren
• 

  Mike Wesch

  future journalism shirky publishing printing

  • 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.
• 

  Nathan Gasser
  • it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business.
• 

  E G
• 25 Mar 09
  

  Robert Lent

  Publishing or Journalism?
  Journalism.

  • ociety doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
• 

  Cole Camplese

  Excellent read and well worth the time.

  news newspapers psuets

• 24 Mar 09
  

  Barbara Lindsey

  newspapers future media shirky publishing printing

• 

  Wendy Stephens

  Newspapers Journalism Read_Write Piracy

• 

  howardfore
• 

  Katie Laird

  newspapers future media journalism publishing

  • 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.

    
    

    “The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments work only where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

    
    

    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.

• 

  Glenn Hoyle

  the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

  future publishing printing newspapers

• 

  guilana sonia

  shirky future media

• 23 Mar 09
  

  Joan Vinall-Cox

  newspapers journalism shirky printing

• 

  BillKracke

  2respond

• 

  el morado

  journalism

• 22 Mar 09
  

  Andrew Murphie

  newspapers journalism digitaljournalism

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  superlumina

  Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including 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.

  newspapers journalism media future shirky publishing printing

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  Eddie Osh

  printing publishing newspapers

• 

  sven duzont
• 

  mike power

  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.

  side journalism media shirky publishing future newspapers articles

• 

  Adam Turetzky

  blog economy copyright politics newspaper

• 

  Chuck Brands
• 21 Mar 09
  

  jmtedder
• 

  Ashley Middleton

  newspapers journalism media future publishing

• 

  Chad Harriss
  • 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 Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments work only where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
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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.
• 

  KO -

  newspapers journalism

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  jeff shear about 16 hours ago
  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.
• 
  Jon Morgan on 2009-12-05
  I've also been there, done that. It's tough.
• 
  Eric Turner on 2009-04-24
  This happens regularly in many industries - to include the military. After Action Reviews are conducted after operations/exercises and then nothing is done to implement changes and ideas. And then the wheel is reinvented every operation and exercise. I'm not looking forward to the same attitude in education when I graduate in a year.
• 
  Sarah Hanawald on 2009-03-20
  Oh crap,I fear that's my job in a nutshell--to research/talk about stuff so that other people can feel it's "covered" and then move on about their regularly scheduled day.
• 
  mrs durff on 2009-03-18
  I'm being ignored at my school - what about you?
• 
  Michael Becker on 2009-03-14
  An excellent question. Those transitional, border, liminal areas of geography and history are always the most fruitful and interesting places to examine.
• 
  Clay Burell on 2009-03-19
  How applicable is this to the charter school / public school schism backed by Obama and Duncan?
• 
  Eric Turner on 2009-04-24
  When will teachers realize they need to get on board with technology before they become irrelevant...much like newspapers? It's pointless to have IT offices in schools and districts if teachers aren't strongly encouraged to use them.
• 
  Tod Baker on 2009-04-18
  When teachers demand to know how we are going to replace the sage-on-the-stage approach to teaching, they are...
• 
  Alexandre Enkerli on 2009-06-12
  Almost relativistic as an approach. Reification and naturalization are social processes.
• 
  John on 2009-03-19
  And it's up to citizens a) to decide the kind of journalism we need, and b) to fight for it.
• 
  Alexandre Enkerli on 2009-06-12
  Even the notion that "journalism" is what's needed can be questioned. Do we really need mediators or are these intermediaries just an effect of the system? Nationalism and journalism go hand in hand. Are we transitioning to post-nationalism?
• 
  Simon B on 2009-03-16
  Good point. We shouldn't confuse the means with the end. Newspapers are not journalism - they contain journalism. If the container is worn out, time to replace it with something new. The end of newspapers does not herald the end of journalism.
• 
  Alexandre Enkerli on 2009-06-12
  Who was talking about pragmatists? Is the debate with ethicists?
• 
  Alexandre Enkerli on 2009-06-12
  The old "crisis as opportunity" principle is part of the public conversation. It's the best of times to be a dreamer. Just now.
• 
  Tod Baker on 2009-04-18
  Educators don't appreciate experiments that eventually fail. They don't want to hear that nothing will work, but everything might.

Page Comments

• 
  dean groom on 2009-04-09
  yes, users can become dis-satisfied, as there is an expectation that some new will be along soon enough - even though institutions cannot develop policy to adopt them in anything like the same time frame.
• 
  Justin Medved on 2009-04-17
  What a great quote!

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