Two good pieces in the last couple of days: one by Clay Shirky and the other by Steven Johnson. They both make the same basic point: much of the supposed innovation in recent decades meant to perpetuate the old business models rather than actually come to terms with emerging realities. Here’s Shirky:
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however.
[...]
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
[...]
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.
Johnson describes that near-future using the metaphor of an ecosystem. He encourages media organizations to look at the richness of technology news — the established, “old-growth forest” of the online world — as proof that the web distributes information more effectively than anything before:
The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change.
Something that occurred to me today is that too much of the discussion has been about the need for people to read news, or more generally, to receive information. As a demonstration, I just went out and bought the new Walrus even though the essay I wanted to read is online (or so it turns out!).
There’s a lot of talk about the (very valid) notion that people will always want something they can touch and hold. What is less often mentioned (if at all) is that people will always want to make those tangible products. As I looked at the rest of the magazines on the rack I had an urge to buy more — I love magazines — but the magazine I really wanted wasn’t there, it doesn’t exist. The urge to buy was overwhelmed by the far stronger urge to create my own magazine based on my own interests, style, and ideas about what other people would like.
That’s the biggest reason there will always be print media: not because there will always be buyers but because there will always be producers. (Coincidentally, the current Walrus has a Hal Niedviecki article about the addiction to making online porn.) Like opening a restaurant or starting a garage band, most of these enterprises fail, but the possibility (or even the near-certainty) of years of personal financial constraint and eventual failure isn’t enough to discourage people from going ahead with them anyways.
And what did your aspiring publisher do the moment he got home (before even opening the magazine — but, admittedly, after refrigerating the Pepsi, humus, and McCain Superfries he just bought)? He flipped open his MacBook and started playing with WordPress (not just to write this post, but to go back and re-categorize/re-structure the old stuff, and work on another more professional site, and futz with the CSS and PHP — which he does not know how to properly do — in the theme of a secret “beta blog” he keeps to constantly try new features and designs).
When there are barriers to getting into print, online is such a close-second option it’s almost a tie for first.
We do we can, where we are, with what we have. If you’re in an attic apartment with no budget you’re going to produce no-budget, open, online stuff — and you’re going to work through weekends and late nights to create as much value, in whatever form, as you can. Meanwhile, people with a newsroom to work in and an established (albeit dwindling) subscriber base will be inclined to leverage that — even when something else looks just a little bit better, availability and familiarity make all the difference.
As Shirky said, at this point everything is an experiment. Nobody knows what the models will be in ten years. The best strategy is to do what you love, do what you’re best at, and constantly work the shit out of it with all available resources — which there are currently more of than most people can count.
Read Clay Shirky on Thinking the Unthinkable and Steven Johnson’s SXSW speech on Old Growth Media and the Future of News (via Felix Salmon).
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