The Chinese Solar Machine Layer by Layer Fire in the Library The Mystery Behind Anesthesia
Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher.
Mark Ostow
Newspapers and magazines won't vanish. But they will change.
Even 15 years ago, Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, those 18th-century London gallants and the founders of the Spectator, would have recognized the modes of business that characterized our newspapers and magazines. Not now.
For 300 years, two related sources of revenues sustained journals: subscriptions and advertising. But the Internet taught readers they might read stories whenever they liked without charge, and it offered companies more-efficient ways to advertise. Both parties spent less. Today, media companies are sickly.
As I write, the New York Times Company is threatening to close the Boston Globe if the latter will not produce $20 million in union concessions. But those cuts could not make the paper profitable. The Globe, which the Times Company bought for $1.1 billion in 1993, would lose $85 million in 2009 without the concessions. Everywhere, newspapers and magazines are going broke.
What can be done to save them? Among those who write about new media, a fashionable wisdom has emerged, expressed most energetically by Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University. In "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," a much-distributed post on his blog, he writes, "Round and round [it] goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know 'If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?' To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work."
The Götterdämmerung-of-mainstream-media argument has a weak and strong formulation. Shirky himself is an eloquent exponent of the gentler version. He argues, "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism." Shirky believes that the coming decades will see a variety of nonprofit experiments whose funding sources will be similar to those that have sustained him as an academic, such as endowments, sponsorships, and grants. One day, some innovator will stumble upon something that will reliably subsidize the journals of the future.
The strong version is most associated with Dave Winer, a grumpy California software programmer best known for helping to develop the Web-feed format RSS and for his blog, Scripting News. Winer has written, and not without glee, "Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists. ... Everyone is now a journalist."
If media companies can't earn money, and everyone is a journalist, it follows that "amateurs" (Shirky) and "sources" (Winer) will be part of a "decentralized" media (Winer), whose stories will be distributed by "excitable 14-year-olds" (Shirky).
This is all folly and ignorance. Shirky, Winer, and other evangelists know nothing about the business of media. True, the journalists who write about these matters for mainstream media often know as little; I didn't understand much until I became the publisher of Technology Review. But Shirky and Winer are disgruntled consumers and, as bloggers, advocates for an insurrection. Thus, they are to be read skeptically. Their prescriptions would be more convincing if they were less polemical and better informed by some knowledge of what publishers sell.
You don't understand what Clay Shirky is saying
So Clay Shirky doesn't understand the media business and you don't understand what Clay Shirky is saying. Did you even read his entire blog post?
What Clay Shirky is saying is that there is now no difference between any 'publication' and any other popular website. There is no difference between the NYT and Perez Hilton, between Technology Review and Boing Boing.
The game is now exactly the same for everybody: attract income over the same distribution channel. No single player or group of players can push anybody else out of this distribution channel. Conclusion: Clay Shirky is correct. If your publication continues to exist it's because whatever your income streams are they are not drying up; and these income streams remain larger than your costs.
That's the same for Perez Hilton and Boing Boing. And for every other website. Clay Shirky correctly observes that your old business model is not doing so well anymore, and you share your new business model with people who simply weren't your competitors five years ago.
What are you doing about this? Frankly my dear, I couldn't care less.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
maryhodder
1 Comment
from one disgruntled consumer
So, one of the reasons people write with "glee" about being able to post information (however correct or incorrect it may be) that sits online side by side with legacy media is that people were really angry with traditional media for losing perspective, telling stories that were more about doing the "he said-she said" balance than getting things fair and accurately stated.
Additionally, you were gatekeepers that kept out perspectives that didn't fit your narratives, however out of sync they were with how real people think.
Regarding printing costs, Clay and Dave both get very well that printing is not the important part of this problem going forward. Clay in his essay was relating the changes the printing press wrought in the 1500s to what is taking place with the internet and changes now. The reason any of us have discussed the old models with print technology is because the physical media is the reason many newspapers claimed that their costs were what they were, in terms of subscriptions, and when they had to raise prices, it was always because of things like paper shortages, not that journalism was costing more. In other words, legacy media trained the users to believe the physicality of the media was the driver of cost for us as buyers.
I think Clay and Dave are asking the same question you are as are the rest of us: how do you pay for the very necessary journalism we need in a democracy?
I don't see why you have to misinterpret the two of them to ask that question.
mary
ps. we aren't consumers. we don't open our beaks like baby birds and get media dropped down our throats and poop cash. we are users, creators, commentors, producers and your partners and if you want us to pay, you need to treat us as equals instead of consumers.
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