Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen: ‘The internet will devour newspapers’

Judith Townend — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:27:31 +0000

Andrew Keen, writing on Telegraph.co.uk, reminds newspapers that they could be made redundant by the internet. Picking up a recent argument made by the author and academic Clay Shirky, Keen writes:

“The core reality of the internet is its absence of a centre. The distributed internet, all edge and no heart, has done away with the centralised structures of power of the old industrial world. And without a core, the news can’t be controlled by a central power. It can no longer be owned.

“The internet is like a blob, a centreless yet all powerful monster, impossible to destroy and yet able to devour everything in its path.”

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

Clay Shirky: ‘Rescuing the reporters’

Laura Oliver — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:54:58 +0000

Taking his own local paper as the basis for his argument, Clay Shirky looks at why local news reporters need ‘a rescue operation’.

“There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model,” he writes.

Newsrooms need to look at the people necessary to producing the ‘iron core of news’ (as defined by Alex Jones) and those who can’t be replace as easily as other areas of content, such as columns, suggests Shirky.

He goes on to argue that working for a non-profit news organisation will be an increasingly attractive option for these reporters as a result.

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

A journalistic limbo until we reach The New World

Benji Lanyado — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:20:47 +0000

According to many, the perfect storm is approaching. The winds have been whipping for a while. But there’s a problem. The Old King is dying but the New King, apparently, isn’t quite ready yet.

Clay Shirky, internet theorist and the harbinger-in-chief of newspaper death, encapsulated the problem at a recent Harvard Shorenstein Center talk:

“We are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism because the old models are breaking faster than the new models will be put in their place.”

He’s right. But, intriguingly, he also slings in a caveat. Shirky imagines a time in the future when everything is hunky-dory, and a broad conglomeration of multiple news organisations will ‘overlap and provide a small percentage of journalism individually, but taken as a whole, represent the same position of accountability held by newspapers in the 20th century’.

Perhaps. But until then, we’ve got a problem.

So what’s going to happen in this imminent limbo stage; when journalism enters an intermediate ’state of nature’?

Allow me to imagine…

1) The paywalls go up, and a black market for scoops emerges

Paywalls and micropayment schemes begin to appear on news websites. A few of them make a decent stab of it: News International in particular, as they have a competitive advantage.

As Malcolm Coles at Econsultancy suggests, Murdoch’s sites begin corralling in Sky News, Sky Sports, Fox as well as umpteen other publications and broadcasters that it owns, offering an attractive package behind the wall.

Jason Wilson, writing at NewMatilda.com, suggests that News Corp will ‘draw on its corporate experience with pay television to leverage audiences and money using niche content of various kinds’ kicks in, and, for a while, it all seems to be working.

Desperate to lure readers beyond the paywalls, the organisations that enacted them scramble for scoops. They get dirty. They hunt for drug scandals and nip slips like never before. Investigative journalism becomes feral. They get some real goodies.

Infuriatingly, the exclusives start being screengrabbed and hijacked on pop-up sites.

A black market for scoops emerges, but readers don’t care if the scoop they are reading is 14th hand and poorly delivered, because they’ve still got it.

Shane Richmond notes in the Telegraph that ‘it doesn’t matter that versions of the story on free sites ‘won’t be as good’ because they’ll be free, which offsets the loss of quality considerably’ (and Google’s Eric Schmidt agrees).

In their death throes, the news organisations desperately extend the paywalls, harvesting as much profit as possible while waiting for the web fairies to work out how to monetise content differently.

They start collaborating, agreeing on micropayment schemes across a broad spectrum of organisations, hoping to regain a semblance of market control. It’s too late. The black market is growing exponentially (in the same way as news stories used to, before the walls stripped them of any possible magnifying effect).

As Mike Masnick suggests in a brilliant debate at PBS Mediashift, with the media heading over a cliff, paywalls become an anvil rather than a parachute.

2) The non-paywall sites are damned because they didn’t

Those organisations who resist the paywalls enter a brief honeymoon period. They have a whale of a time as readership goes through the roof following The Great Paywall Migration.

As Masnick imagines, ‘many of their biggest competitors just took themselves out of the market. If I’m running a major newspaper the night that everyone starts to charge, I’m dancing for joy because my competitors just stepped out of a huge market and left it to me’.

But there’s no plan B. After the initial migration surge, the profits of the non-paywall organisations resume their downward spiral, albeit from a higher peak.

They try building their businesses around an events model, but this quickly runs out of steam, and distorts their raison d’etre – news – into a poor-quality loss leader.

They experiment with membership schemes, but find that in an increasingly mobile, classless age, there just isn’t a demographic for them to rely on.

3) The fall of ‘quality’ news

All the big news organisations find themselves in a major pickle. They have century-old reputations to maintain, and a decimated budget with which to maintain them. But their readers expect the same volume of content. So the news organisations begin churning out rubbish.

Freelancers are axed, in-house editors and writers are forced into frantically doubling their output, and original reporting is replaced by regurgitated press releases and wires.

As Roy Gleenslade already sees, ‘the press is no longer acting as a watchdog. It does not bite or bark. It has muzzled itself and retired to the kennel to live off PR scraps.’

Scandals begin to go un-investigated by the big organisations because of a lack of funds and a burgeoning, necessity-driven penchant for boobs and celebrities. Regional controversies are deemed not ‘mass-appeal’ enough to be pursued by the nationals, and there’s no regional paper left to fill the void.

Society flounders without a thriving journalistic watchdog. Clay Shirky’s dystopian prediction, voiced at Harvard, of an increase in ‘casual endemic corruption’ in small communities comes to pass, writ large.

4) The rise of ‘all blogosphere’, and the government subsidy solution

Meanwhile, in tiny office-bedrooms across the country, thousands of new online news organisations are doing nicely. The black market scoop-jackers die out, and a new, mature breed begin to emerge.

The vast majority are rubbish. But some aren’t. They start getting the local scoops that the big organisations don’t have the resources to cover.

Occasionally they get something big. The good ones build enough of a readership to start cashing in.

Without the giant newsrooms and overheads, they begin to turn a modest profit. The blogosphere becomes what it has always threatened to be (and in some places – notably the US – already is, almost) a fantastically broad, fragmented organic news source.

But the quality still isn’t quite there. Obama’s prediction of an ‘all blogosphere’ news environment becomes dangerously close to realisation. The old news organisations that are still clinging on for life have one final play left in them, and turn to the government en masse.

In the face of widespread industrial pressure, and public pressure born of a desire to see journalism saved from the realms of populism and boobs, governments begin to bail out the bigger news organisations. In Britain, the BBC subsidy is chopped up and dished out to a handful of stripped-down organisations in return for a stake and light-handed influence.

5) The New World

Shirky’s vision of a conglomeration of multiple news organisations begins to take shape. A handful of old media names, dramatically reduced in size and scope, survive thanks to government propping. This ‘new BBC’ competes with the vastly augmented blogosphere, and journalism becomes healthy once again.

A version of this post first appeared on BenjiLanyado.com. Benji Lanyado (@benjilanyado) is a freelance journalist based in London and a travel writer for the Guardian and the New York Times.

Similar Posts:

Nieman Journalism Lab: Clay Shirky – Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good

Judith Townend — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:04:16 +0000

The Nieman Journalism Lab has helpfully supplied the audio and a transcript for a talk by Clay Shirky, NYU professor and internet theorist, at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University this week. Shirky looked at social accountability in the context of shifting business models for news.

“I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

Rusbridger on the future of journalism: “I don’t think we would ever go back to having a little pool of elite commentators”

Judith Townend — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:44:06 +0000

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s (@arusbridger) thoughts shared with the web this week:

Here, in yesterday’s lecture at Queen Mary, University of London, part of the university’s Art Week 2009.

And a video of Alan Rusbridger at the Institut für Medienpolitik in Berlin on April 22, speaking on the future of journalism and explaining how the Guardian opened up its site to a wider pool of contributors. Some extracts:

“I don’t think we would ever go back to having a little pool of elite commentators, who help appeal to themselves.”

“(…)Bad things are going to happen where newspapers are going to die. There are going to be fewer journalists and the really pricey business of quality journalism is going to require subsidy from somewhere. It’s a broken model.”

On Twitter: “You harness this brilliant pool of knowledge out there. It’s a fantastic marketing tool. It’s a fantastic journalistic tool.”

He says reading Clay Shirky, Adrian Monck, Jeff Jarvis and the Niemen Foundation, via Twitter, is like receiving a personalised wire feed on the world’s press each morning – a service you’d have paid a consultant a lot of money for, in the past.

(NB: We’re glad to note that he’s following @journalismnews too…)

Alan Rusbridger on the Future of Journalism from Carta on Vimeo.

Similar Posts:

Adrian Monck: A response to Clay Shirky on newspaper paywalls

Laura Oliver — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:56:08 +0000

Adrian Monck argues against Clay Shirky’s post earlier this week on the broken business model of newspapers, in particular the success of paywalls for financial news sites.

Their survival is ‘based around a professional community, no around the value of information per se’, writes Monck.

Full story at this link…

Similar Posts:

Clay Shirky: The old model’s broken – don’t try to replace it

Laura Oliver — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:51:40 +0000

“‘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,” writes Shirky.

The problem that publishing fixed – reducing the cost and difficulty of making information available to the public – has stopped being a problem because of the internet, he adds. As such it’s becoming less relevant to talk about ‘a publishing industry’.

Full post at this link…

Similar Posts:

Online Information 2008 kicking off now

Judith Townend — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:31:25 +0000

Clay Shirky, author of ‘Here Comes Everybody’ is the keynote speaker at Online Information 2008, a conference designed to bring together technology and content. Here’s a preview of Shirky from YouTube (part one. Part Two here):

We’ll keep an eye on the Twitter reports which don’t seem to have started yet – probably on this tag when they do.

Similar Posts:

AOP: Today’s television ‘may not be worth sitting still for’, says US author Clay Shirky

Judith Townend — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:14:36 +0000

Even children can’t concentrate on television anymore, says Clay Shirky, the US-based internet educator, consultant and author of ‘Here comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations’.

In his speech at yesterday’s AOP Digital Publishing summit Shirky told an anecdote about the four-year-old daughter of one of his friends watching a film: “[S]he jumps round behind the TV and [starts] rooting around in the wires, looking for the mouse.”

Today’s television ‘may not be worth sitting still for’, but the computer is for everything.

The problem for media professionals is that the industry still holds the perception that everyone sees publishing in the same way, he explained.

But, he said, citing the example of Flickr, material may be ‘in public but [it's] not for the public. The cost of putting something out in public has fallen so low.’

“This is a reversal of the usual pattern,” he said. ‘Gather and share has been the usual pattern [of publishing] since time immemorial’, but now grouping comes first.

He split his talk into three categories: the sharing culture of Flickr; the collaborative nature of Wikipedia; and the collective action of internet groupings, citing the use of a Facebook group to force HSBC to reverse its decision on withdrawing students’ interest-free overdrafts.

These examples, he said, show the ‘the environment that’s coming’ and a need to re-think the model’.

“If you wait to hear what the business model is you will hear that your competitors have perfected it,” he said.

Shirky compared today’s media trends to London’s 17th-century gin craze: at first people didn’t know what to do with what they were consuming, but they then learnt how to share, collaborate and collect.

“The action is where people are going after the consumers. Not just consuming, but producing and sharing.”

Similar Posts: