Newspapers and the Unthinkable
We’ve all heard about the death of print and that new technologies have changed the power balance between authors and publishers. The newspaper powerhouses struggle under the pressure of discovering new and viable business models to achieve the same business goals.
It’s an interesting revolution happening, and one that Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations is especially equipped to discuss. As he said in the book, the world with the computer is an entirely different world than the world before the computer. As the world was different after the invention of the printing press, as compared to the world before the printing press. And he makes a good case to explain that we’re in the midst of just such a revolution for the world of newspapers.
Clay Shirky’s essay on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable outlines the options newspapers chose to consider when they saw this revolution coming. Those in the industry who really saw what was happening in the outside world were pushed aside, marginalised and disenfranchised in favour of the fable that newspapers wouldn’t go away.
It’s interesting that he notes that we have a lot of information about before the Gutenberg press and about the century after the Gutenburg press. But what happened at the time? This is the dilemma of standing in the middle of a revolution. The good news, of course, is we’re going to invent a new paradigm to fit the newspaper problem through innovation, trial and error and people inventing stuff we never thought of until now. However, he points out, we do need journalism and we need to shift from trying to save newspapers to saving society. Good point.
One last nail in that newspaper coffin that I’d like to add: they are made of a finite resource that processes our carbon dioxide. Further, the ink of newsprint is highly toxic to the environment. The newspaper itself is a large physical resource consumption for a very limited time use that environmentally doesn’t stack up. Millions and millions of tons of toxic waste every single day. The writing has been on a couple of walls about the death of the newspaper… give Clay’s article a read.
