'How do we save newspapers?' is the wrong question!

[kevyn]

"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." -- Gordy Thompson

New Media thinker Clay Shirkey has written a fascinating essay, "Newspapers and the Unthinkable" on the future (or lack thereof) of newspapers.

In it, he addresses some of the very issues that I myself have been thinking about: how newspapers are in total meltdown because of the web and services like Craigslist, how the Internet is a revolution every bit as profound as the Gutenberg Press, and how the question of "How do we save newspapers?" is the wrong question to be asking -- because newspapers are dying, and that process probably can't be stopped. The question should be, "How do we replace the essential function of newspapers?"

And the scary answer is: We don't know yet.

( Ganked from BoingBoing )

Comments

[pocketlama.livejournal.com]

"How do we replace the essential function of newspapers?"

Yes, that's my fear as well. Bloggers can break a story like the best of them but they don't have the money, training, resources, years of cultivation of sources, and ethical standards (although those have been slipping horribly in the news world lately).

The loss of the P.I. here in Seattle is saddening because we will lose their strong investigative journalism. They broke a number of important stories and they followed through with them, printing multiple parts and fleshing out the story so we could understand the beginning, middle, and end. No blogger out there now can do that.

I hate U.S. journalists for their pansy ways of embracing the status-quo. in other countries journalists pay for their stories with their lives. Our journalists have no excuse to give in to power so willingly.

Still, at the moment they're all we have. What comes next? I just want it here soon!

[kevynjacobs.livejournal.com]

> The loss of the P.I. here in Seattle is saddening because we will lose their strong investigative journalism.

But they will still be there online... at least for now. I'm willing to give the P.I. the benefit of the doubt... dumping the dead tree edition might be what ultimately saves the P.I..

> I hate U.S. journalists for their pansy ways of embracing the status-quo. in other countries journalists pay for their stories with their lives. Our journalists have no excuse to give in to power so willingly.

I agree 100% about being disgusted with the state of American journalism. Again, maybe this shake up is exactly what American journalism needs?

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Makes me damn glad that Kady and I are both out of the biz for good.

If the United States were more sane, I would love to see some sort of publically subsidized news reporting to complement things like blogs. That would be fraught with political problems, and there would have to be some serious safeguarding to make sure that it didn't turn into propaganda, but to have a newspaper equivalent of PBS would be a quite adequate start to replacing the current system sustainably.

[kevynjacobs.livejournal.com]

> Makes me damn glad that Kady and I are both out of the biz for good.

Me too. Kady knows I have predicted the demise of dead tree editions for a long, long time... as New Media pioneers, she and I were there for (and part of the cause of) the death of the newspaper. It wasn't a popular opinion for me to express around the newsroom, but I could see this day coming.

Your "equivalent of PBS" is an interesting idea. Over the next few years, we're going to see a lot of experiments.

I'd join the experimentation, but I'm just not a reporter.