If you read one blog post this year, make it Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.”
It’s the kind of thoughtful research and ideas about the future of newspapers and journalism that you won’t find in Time Magazine or The New York Times. It’s the kind of straight realism — and not the radicalism that many would have you believe — that this industry needs. I know it, you know it — we all know it: Journalism is rapidly changing in ways we can’t predict, and the old models are becoming obsolete faster than new models can develop:
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.
I refuse to lie to people about the state of journalism or our future. I hope more journalists stop this game. Everything is changing.
I have been saying for awhile that there will be a dead period between when newspapers finally fall from being the dominant form of American journalism until new, viable journalism enterprises take their place. I can’t tell you how long it will be until the Internet/mobile can effectively replace newspapers. It could take the majority of my life until we see that reality.
But I can tell you this, a revolution is occurring. Make no mistake about it. Everything that we have ever known about journalism is coming to an end. It is both incredibly exciting and scary. Newspapers will be replaced.
When and by what? None of us can say.
Printing a newspaper took considerable resources. Starting a blog is free. That’s the fundamental problem with newspapers.
You can’t monopolize a free distribution medium. And newspapers were monopolies. They were uncompetitive.
We probably suffered because of the uncompetitive nature of newspapers. Imagine instead of having one outlet with one voice covering an area or topic, a virtually limitless amount of voices covering an area or topic? The Internet has the power to free us from all the bad parts of newspapers — shallow coverage, lack of transparency and misplaced trust in an ethos of objectivity, instead of honesty and fairness.
Make no mistake about it, there is a lot not to like about newspapers. And I would be shocked if journalism wasn’t exponentially superior 50 years from now than what we have today.
Trust me, business models will follow, especially when newspapers fall. When billions of dollars of advertising are freed from newspapers, it will naturally flow somewhere else. Advertisers will eventually realize that the Internet is by far the superior advertising vehicle.
The Internet will finally allow for targeted advertising, and it also gives far greater metrics over who is viewing ads. Plus, the Internet is opening up the ability for many more people to advertise too. Many people couldn’t afford to advertise in newspapers, even though they wanted to.
Advertisers have also been slow to grasp the power of the Internet. But they will. And people will make money off of journalism on the Web.
It’s not a matter of if, but when.
And that’s just the thing. None of us can say when that switchover will occur. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but when we make it through this revolution, we will be producing better journalism.
It’s time to embrace what we know to be true.
