This is a really marvelous essay, positing that no one really knows what's going to work and come out ahead 20 years from now, but we should be trying lots of stuff.
Gems:
“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.”
This is so on the nose it's scary.
Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
And this is exactly what people have been pointing out here on JStartup since we launched the other week. All of these essays in Time, the NYTimes, the Atlantic etc, have all been proposing fundamentally backwards, conservative, keep-the-genie-in-the-bottle solutions to what's ailing advertising companies that publish news to market their advertising. None of them will work, Shirky says here, because they've been tried before, but also because they are on the wrong side of history itself.
Round and round this 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. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
More scary truth-telling.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
Newspapers are an advertising model that uses original news/reporting as a marketing tool to get people to look at their ads. That's all. The journalism itself can appear in many more contexts, they just have to be invented.
This is a really marvelous essay, positing that no one really knows what's going to work and come out ahead 20 years from now, but we should be trying lots of stuff.
Gems:
“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.”
This is so on the nose it's scary.
Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
And this is exactly what people have been pointing out here on JStartup since we launched the other week. All of these essays in Time, the NYTimes, the Atlantic etc, have all been proposing fundamentally backwards, conservative, keep-the-genie-in-the-bottle solutions to what's ailing advertising companies that publish news to market their advertising. None of them will work, Shirky says here, because they've been tried before, but also because they are on the wrong side of history itself.
Round and round this 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. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
More scary truth-telling.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.
Newspapers are an advertising model that uses original news/reporting as a marketing tool to get people to look at their ads. That's all. The journalism itself can appear in many more contexts, they just have to be invented.
Here's a discussion happening among technologists about this article at Hacker News
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515749
Also required reading for anyone doing social/community journalism as part of the future:
A group is its own worst enemy
Thanks for adding that in, and for finding this originally. I tried submitting it, only to find that you beat me to it!