What We Need

by digby

Obviously, there has been a lot of chatter about the demise of the newspaper industry recently, mainly because of ... the demise of the newspaper industry. This exchange between Markos and Alex Baldwin yesterday sparked this comment from Atrios:

I think what happens in these discussions - and I've been guilty of it myself - is the conflation of a few different issues. One conversation is about how newspapers could change, perhaps shrugging off certain somewhat odd constraints, to be a more appealing product. That's the subscriber side. Another conversation is about the various reasons, other than declining readership, for declining advertising revenue. Still a third conversation is about all the awesome things newspaper organizations coulda shoulda and maybe still could do to improve their internet business model.

And Markos is referencing a fourth conversation,the quietest one, about how some of the companies who own newspapers are in trouble not because the business models are in trouble, but because they just made stupid fucking business decisions.


I like newspapers. I certainly read a lot of them, always have. But I don't actually care a whole lot about their businesses. The history of newspaper ownership and their relationship to advertisers is hardly one to make one nostalgic for the good old days. It's always been compromised and this is just the latest chapter in many sordid tales of newspaper malfeasance.

But I was interested in this essay by Clay Shirky, which made the rounds a few weeks ago, called Newspapers and Thinking The Unthinkable. I urge you to read it all, but I think this captures the essence of his thesis, which is pretty obvious although you rarely hear anyone say it:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

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.

Let's hope so.

That process has actually been underway for some time and though it's worrying that something bad could happen during the transition, the truth is that many, many bad things happened at the hands of plutocrat publishers over the years, not the least of which was a bunch of wars. So, I'm not fretting and even though I confess to loving the New York Times on Sunday and depending greatly on newspapers to do what I do, I agree with Shirky that society needs journalism not newspapers. When you look at it that way, it's entirely possible that this new era will be a decided improvement over what we've known.


Update: Avedon Carol has some interesting thoughts on this issue as well.