Clay Shirky: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

Hey, Clay just published a really important paper on the newspaper business.

The point is that the basis for the conventional newspaper model has gone away, meaning that we need to experiment a lot more.

Maybe a lot of this has been said, but he articulates the case really well, placing it in historical context. It applies to maybe all organizations.

Tangent: references to this paper are spreading it virally on Twitter, maybe elsewhere.

Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

...

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 pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like 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.

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 its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Comments

[Jay O'Connell]

I can foresee a time when the major newspaper brands exist as certification seals on top of people who look a lot like what we now call 'bloggers.' These bloggers, to earn the seal, would have to lead lives at least as transparent as the Newspapers are now, so their credibility could be established. (We need to know how people make their money to be able to evaluate their content.)

Even with all the errors in reporting at the NYT of late, I still trust a NYT piece more than the piece written by a blogger like myself. Nobody fact checks me. Now, I can learn through a dialog with others, but I can also disinform without meaning to.

Increasing the net sum of reliable human knowledge is our shared goal; we want to make the planet smarter. Overall, I think the net does this.

What a time to be alive!

[larry278]

I take it that Clay refers to citizen/journalists to augment the rapidly declining number of paid, professional journalists becoming unemployed writers as newspapers continue to fail at an ever more rapid pace in 2009. Let's hope that someone uses or retrains these skilled writers.