Our Blog: where do you stand?

Unthinkable News for Newspapers

By: Loren Wassell | 04/16/2009

To all that has been written on the Internet's impact on traditional newspapers, a leading expert on the ‘net's effects managed to add significant new thinking a few weeks ago with an essay called "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable."

Newspapers saw the threat from the start. But - as his title points out - they didn't respond effectively because they were trying to save the traditional newspaper business model from its unthinkable destruction.

The author is Clay Shirky, who has been writing, consulting and teaching about the Internet since at least 1996. He is validated as an expert on the ‘net's social and economic effects in Chris Anderson's pivotal book "The Long Tail."

You can get the short version of what the destruction means from a Shirky excerpt posted this week by the U.K.'s Guardian, "Stop Press - And Then What?"

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.

That's the crux of it, but if you care about the subject, you'll want to read Shirky's original 2,800-word post in its original form and then start into his other posts.

He traces recognition of the Internet threat to 1993, when the Knight-Ridder chain was trying to get a handle on piracy of Dave Berry's column, to protect the syndication income from selling it to other newspapers. One of the culprits was a Midwestern teenager who just wanted to share the humor. A New York Times editor told Shirky:

"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."

The problem was the unthinkable reality.

"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.

For centuries, the cost of a printing press was an important factor in the economics of news distribution. As the New Yorker's press critic, A.J. Liebling, sardonically observed, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

Shirky points out that the limited number of presses forced advertisers to deal with the press owners. Publishers could charge enough to pay for their news operation, which might include two full-time reporters in the state capitol and, say, a bureau in Baghdad. The advertisers had to pay the going rate. No more.

What the Internet has wrought is a world in which anyone with a computer can now be a publisher, without the enormous capital costs of buying a press. No wonder it was unthinkable to publishers.

As recently as this Wednesday, Sam Zell is quoted in his own Chicago Tribune as saying his $8.2 billion leveraged purchase of the paper in 2007 was a mistake.

By definition, if you bought something and it's now worth a great deal less, you made a mistake and I'm more than willing to say I made a mistake. ... I was too optimistic in terms of the newspaper's ability to preserve its position.

It's very obvious that the newspaper model in its current form does not work and the sooner we all acknowledge that the better. ... Whether it be home delivery, whether it be giving content away for free - these are critical issues.

We are seriously looking at everything because in effect the future of the newspaper industry is at risk today.

It remains to be seen how news will be gathered and shared in this new world. As Shirky puts it:

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.

While we wait to find out what will work to provide us with news, perhaps we can take some comfort from another famous quote from Liebling, the press critic, who died in 1963:

"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."

Posted in Digital Communications