Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

by kf • 17 years ago

99 37 17 years ago

lacker• 17 years ago

I love this quote:

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.

njharman• 17 years ago

It's wrong though.

The better insight is "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 huge opportunity and you better damn well figure out how you can engage that 14yr old as an ally/partner.

karl11• 17 years ago

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

Right now, I don't see any real journalism that occurs only in the online world. And we really do need it to keep watch on those in power. I understand his argument that journalism is the underlying thing we need, and newspapers are merely the current vehicle for providing it. But in my opinion, when some really great online innovation happens with regards to journalism, then it would be OK for newspapers to be pushed out. But until then, I think we should save the newspapers.

bokonist9• 17 years ago

Really? I see it all the time. In Tech, you have sites like Techcrunch, Engadget, and Mashable. For science you have sites like Climate Audit and Real Climate. For world affairs, Michael Totten, Michael Yon, Exile, and numerous blogs. Economics, Brad Setser and Naked Capitalism.

In fact, it's hard to think of a single topic in which the best coverage comes from the old school media.

marbletiles5• 17 years ago

In Tech, you have sites like Techcrunch... That's a fail right there. Techcrunch is the bete noir of tech journalism, as Last.FM showed, and as Alex Payne ranted about: http://al3x.net/2009/03/03/towards-better-technology-journal...

The larger problem isn't really coverage however -- it's not about getting the stories out there, although that will ultimately become a problem as societies formerly brought together by newspapers fracture into interest groups. There's no shortage of coverage online.

The problem is in the reporting. Many of the things you link to are actually about commentary on reporting done by others ("commentary" is even in Naked Capitalism's site description). The actual reporting and investigation is, by and large, still done by journalists working for newspapers.

Print media and businesses supported by it, like the newswires, are the wellspring of the vast majority of our news, and we drink from the river of information they ultimately become. Formerly the problem was merely that the wellsprings were tainted by bias and poor stewardship, and we were trying to make online solutions to clean it up -- which proved to be a difficult task.

Now the wellsprings are drying up, and we've got an even tougher job to do.

brandnewlow3• 17 years ago

This stuff takes time. Talking Points Memo wasn't built in a day. Here's what I'm doing in Chicago. It's not perfect, but it's working. Let me know what you think.

1. Build a social news site for local stuff. Gather an audience of local news junkies who like sharing, rating and discussing the best links from across the city. This is a somewhat efficient way to generate pageviews and gather like-minded folks together. Exhibit A: http://www.windycitizen.com the first local, social news site.

2. When you find crazy power-users of your social news site who have specific passions for topics, create blogs for them and nurture their interest in writing about these niche subjects. Exhibit B: http://dailydaley.windycitizen.com a group blog written by a handful of our power users that posts a daily briefing on the mayor of Chicago's appearances, schedule, comments and coverage. We have 40 more blogs where that came from, of varying quality but with some really good ones here and there http://www.windycitizen.com/blogs

3. Team up with local hackers for the occasional special project that scorches the local sites. Exhibit C: http://election.windycitizen.com, a rails app built by HN member collint

4. When you feel the social news site is growing consistently and having an influence in the community, hire a part-time ad sales person to develop relationships with local businesses who want to reach your audience. Exhibit B: The Craigslist ad I posted last week: http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/sls/1071989015.html I've had 5 great resumes sent my way so far and am excited to put this piece of the plan into motion.

5. Once you get $300-400 dollars a week in profit coming in, you can afford to hire an honest-to-goodness pro journalist to cover whatever it is your community is interested in that week, scooping the dying local papers at least once a week. If the story has national implications, you pitch it to Gawker, Politico and the HuffPo and rack up the backlinks and google mojo, making your social news aggregator even more powerful.

6. Add more writers to your blogs, which are essentially open source journalism projects. Some may grow to be powerful/influential in their own right, letting you sell more niche advertising or get direct donations.

7. Get to the point where your front page links are driving 1,500-2,000 readers to the stories that make them (which would make you the most powerful traffic-supplier for local sites), your blogs are breaking news every now and then and doing a great job of covering ongoing stories a la TPM. And your special reports, directed in part by the votes and story submissions of your users are setting the agenda in your community.

8. Repeat elsewhere.

Am curious to hear what folks think. The limiting agent for us is always technical development. We're using Drupal and I've learned that 9 out of 10 contributed modules either don't work or are so poorly-designed you'd never want to use them on a production site. This has meant paying and begging friends for custom dev work and me having to learn a lot more Drupal than I want. But that's the thing that I'm trying out here in Chicago. I think of it as a kind of open source newspaper.

unalone• 17 years ago

This is fascinating! I know you wrote me about your site a few days ago, but I only saw the front page: the more detailed expansion is an excellent idea. I'd love to see if you can get to the point where you're hiring journalists. If that goes well, you might have just started the first online local newspaper.

Add more writers to your blogs, which are essentially open source journalism projects.

That's a great mindset. Make blogs into projects and see what works and what doesn't.

mainsequence• 17 years ago

Inspiring idea. Have you considered aggregating the various twitter feeds of your bloggers?

How reliant are you on your own personal knowledge of Chicago to make this viable?

Were you inspired by similar projects in other cities?

smhinsey• 17 years ago

Relative to offline journalism, the amount of work that gets done by online-only outlets is small, but it's certainly not zero. Look at places like Slate (disclosure, I work for Newsweek, and we share a corporate parent with Slate) and Salon. Most major outlets also have "web exclusive" reporting, which while frequently soft can occasionally surprise.

alan-crowe• 17 years ago

Do we really need journalists? We already have political parties.

Newspapers in 1900 published political speeches in their entirety. Over the years political reporting has cut down on the politicians' own words and created an important role for journalist as meta-politician, an intermediary between citizen and politician.

We read the newspaper to find out what Labour say, what the LibDems say, what the Conservatives say, and instead we get the journalists version. If it is just neutral reporting we could go instead to the parties websites and get their views directly. If the political news has been spun by the journalist we are more strongly motivated to go to the websites to get the news straight from the horses mouth. The journalist owes his position in the system due to the need to own and operate expensive printing presses in order to disseminate information.

I've been making this point for a few years and at first it was a pretty stupid point. The websites of the political parties were crap. But my point makes sense, and on checking again today I find the websites are much improved.

bokonist9• 17 years ago

People tend to overestimate the value of newspaper journalism. Paul Graham does a great job of exploding the myth of business journalism in his "submarine" essay. Financial journalism has obviously been just as bad.

The worst, though, is political journalism. Most "journalism" is simply writers being a conduit for leaks and bureaucratic turf wars. Woodward and Bernstein did not uncover Watergate. They were tools of one branch of power ( the FBI ) that wanted to strike against another branch ( the Nixon White House). The crime was not discovered by journalists, but by illegal FBI surveillance. ( http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20081222_death_deep_throat_an... ) It would actually be an enormous improvement if these agencies just said what they wanted to say through blogs, rather than filtering it through "journalists".

freejoe762• 17 years ago

Seems like you're painting some pretty broad strokes here. There's a difference between national and local political news. There's a difference between national and local business news. Even within local there are many flavors of news (small-town, big-city, suburban paper, etc.). And, though you don't see it, there's a heck of a lot more local journalism that gets done every day than there is national.

cyunker• 17 years ago

RE: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20081222_death_deep_throat_an...

Well this certainly isn't journalism. It's just a big conspiracy theory with no sources to back it up.

critic• 17 years ago

> myth of business journalism in his "submarine" essay

Fascinating article! Thanks for the tip. Submitted :-)

greyman• 17 years ago

>>> It would actually be an enormous improvement if these agencies just said what they wanted to say through blogs, rather than filtering it through "journalists". <<<

But as you wrote, they will just say what they want to say, which might non necessarily by the truth...so while it might be entertaining to read such a blog, ultimately I want to know what each party is saying, also with some background research, and that is a work of a journalist. Of course, another issue is whether current journalism plays such a role...

freejoe762• 17 years ago

"The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau." I know this is figurative language, but Shirky made a bad choice -- Wal-Mart doesn't advertise in newspapers much. They experimented with a large push three years ago, and decided it wasn't worthwhile. ( source: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display... )

dschoon• 17 years ago

Irrespective of whether you agree with all the points here--and there are many thoughtful ones--let's all take a moment to agree the writing here is excellent.

mattchew• 17 years ago

Very good writing. You have to distrust yourself a little after reading an article like this. Am I persuaded by the message, or charmed by the style?

Hexstream• 17 years ago

Choice quotes:

"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.

[...]

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."

thwarted• 17 years ago

This entry in how the unthinkable unfolds doesn't seem to fit with the others in that same paragraph (because the others, while unthinkable, are consistent with experience), and stands out to me:

Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits.

Other than people exploiting inefficiencies through having a monopoly, I can't think of one case where reduction of inefficiencies also reduces profit. The problem is that those who thought that were willing to make changes, as this article points out, but not the kind of changes that would exploit the increases in efficiencies.

dmfdmf• 17 years ago

I used to think that the problem with newspapers and journalism was a revenue problem. (e.g. CL took their classified ad revenue). Like a lot of people, I thought that eventually someone would figure out a new source of stable revenues and all would be fine. I now see that the problem is much bigger than that.

I think the important point that is easy to miss is that we are in the very early stages of a major social revolution, probably the biggest in human history. Institutions like the Catholic church or the NYT and the MSM (today) are what communicate and sustain the culture (whether you agreed with them or not). This is what the internet has broken. It takes time for new institutions to form but that is the process that is underway right now and that process will probably take decades.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

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