Shirky in a nutshell: Let newspapers die, don’t charge for news
The Nieman Laboratory has transcribed a talk by Internet thinker Clay Shirky that he delivered to Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy earlier this week.
His subject was the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers. Even for those of us familiar with his ideas, he brought in a few new wrinkles, which have already been the subject of commentary around the web.
But I think Clay’s ideas are worth hearing in toto, so using audio from the Shorenstein Center, we’ve made a transcript of his entire talk. …
a few highlights from Clay. On the temporary alignment of advertising-based business models and difficult journalism:
…it was an accident. There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.
On the online companies that have eaten away at parts of newspapers’ ad model:
The institutions harrying newspapers — Monster and Match and Craigslist — all have the logic that if you want to list a job or sell a bike, you don’t go to the place that’s printing news from Antananarivo and the crossword puzzle. You go to the place that’s good for listing jobs and selling bikes. And so if you had a good idea for a business, you wouldn’t launch it in order to give the profits to the newsroom. You’d launch it in order to give the profits to the shareholders.
And on his pessimism about the current moment:
I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So 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.
Reading the full talk is worth the time investment.