
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable - rms
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
======
bokonist
People tend to overestimate the value of newspaper journalism. Paul Graham
does a great job of exploding the myth of business journalism in his
"submarine" essay. Financial journalism has obviously been just as bad.

The worst, though, is political journalism. Most "journalism" is simply
writers being a conduit for leaks and bureaucratic turf wars. Woodward and
Bernstein did not uncover Watergate. They were tools of one branch of power (
the FBI ) that wanted to strike against another branch ( the Nixon White
House). The crime was not discovered by journalists, but by illegal FBI
surveillance. (
[http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20081222_death_deep_throat_an...](http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20081222_death_deep_throat_and_crisis_journalism)
) It would actually be an enormous improvement if these agencies just said
what they wanted to say through blogs, rather than filtering it through
"journalists".

~~~
freejoe76
Seems like you're painting some pretty broad strokes here. There's a
difference between national and local political news. There's a difference
between national and local business news. Even within local there are many
flavors of news (small-town, big-city, suburban paper, etc.). And, though you
don't see it, there's a heck of a lot more local journalism that gets done
every day than there is national.

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lacker
I love this quote:

 _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._

~~~
njharman
It's wrong though.

The better insight is "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
huge opportunity and you better damn well figure out how you can engage that
14yr old as an ally/partner.

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karl11
_"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."_

Right now, I don't see any real journalism that occurs only in the online
world. And we really do need it to keep watch on those in power. I understand
his argument that journalism is the underlying thing we need, and newspapers
are merely the current vehicle for providing it. But in my opinion, when some
really great online innovation happens with regards to journalism, then it
would be OK for newspapers to be pushed out. But until then, I think we should
save the newspapers.

~~~
brandnewlow
This stuff takes time. Talking Points Memo wasn't built in a day. Here's what
I'm doing in Chicago. It's not perfect, but it's working. Let me know what you
think.

1\. Build a social news site for local stuff. Gather an audience of local news
junkies who like sharing, rating and discussing the best links from across the
city. This is a somewhat efficient way to generate pageviews and gather like-
minded folks together. Exhibit A: <http://www.windycitizen.com> the first
local, social news site.

2\. When you find crazy power-users of your social news site who have specific
passions for topics, create blogs for them and nurture their interest in
writing about these niche subjects. Exhibit B:
<http://dailydaley.windycitizen.com> a group blog written by a handful of our
power users that posts a daily briefing on the mayor of Chicago's appearances,
schedule, comments and coverage. We have 40 more blogs where that came from,
of varying quality but with some really good ones here and there
<http://www.windycitizen.com/blogs>

3\. Team up with local hackers for the occasional special project that
scorches the local sites. Exhibit C: <http://election.windycitizen.com>, a
rails app built by HN member collint

4\. When you feel the social news site is growing consistently and having an
influence in the community, hire a part-time ad sales person to develop
relationships with local businesses who want to reach your audience. Exhibit
B: The Craigslist ad I posted last week:
<http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/sls/1071989015.html> I've had 5 great
resumes sent my way so far and am excited to put this piece of the plan into
motion.

5\. Once you get $300-400 dollars a week in profit coming in, you can afford
to hire an honest-to-goodness pro journalist to cover whatever it is your
community is interested in that week, scooping the dying local papers at least
once a week. If the story has national implications, you pitch it to Gawker,
Politico and the HuffPo and rack up the backlinks and google mojo, making your
social news aggregator even more powerful.

6\. Add more writers to your blogs, which are essentially open source
journalism projects. Some may grow to be powerful/influential in their own
right, letting you sell more niche advertising or get direct donations.

7\. Get to the point where your front page links are driving 1,500-2,000
readers to the stories that make them (which would make you the most powerful
traffic-supplier for local sites), your blogs are breaking news every now and
then and doing a great job of covering ongoing stories a la TPM. And your
special reports, directed in part by the votes and story submissions of your
users are setting the agenda in your community.

8\. Repeat elsewhere.

Am curious to hear what folks think. The limiting agent for us is always
technical development. We're using Drupal and I've learned that 9 out of 10
contributed modules either don't work or are so poorly-designed you'd never
want to use them on a production site. This has meant paying and begging
friends for custom dev work and me having to learn a lot more Drupal than I
want. But that's the thing that I'm trying out here in Chicago. I think of it
as a kind of open source newspaper.

~~~
unalone
This is fascinating! I know you wrote me about your site a few days ago, but I
only saw the front page: the more detailed expansion is an excellent idea. I'd
love to see if you can get to the point where you're hiring journalists. If
that goes well, you might have just started the first online local newspaper.

 _Add more writers to your blogs, which are essentially open source journalism
projects._

That's a great mindset. Make blogs into projects and see what works and what
doesn't.

~~~
brandnewlow
Thanks. Your front-page critique was really helpful. I'm working on putting a
few of your suggestions into practice.

The design thing that drives me mad is figuring out what the front page should
look like. How do you combine a Digg/Reddit interface with original content
without short-changing one or the other? If there are any pro or amateur UI
designers out there with advice, I'm all ears. I've created about 40 front
page mockups in the last year and finally just decided to stick the original
stuff in the sidebar to focus on getting the social news up and running as
best possible.

------
Hexstream
Choice quotes:

"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.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

[...]

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.

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."

------
dmfdmf
I used to think that the problem with newspapers and journalism was a revenue
problem. (e.g. CL took their classified ad revenue). Like a lot of people, I
thought that eventually someone would figure out a new source of stable
revenues and all would be fine. I now see that the problem is much bigger than
that.

I think the important point that is easy to miss is that we are in the very
early stages of a major social revolution, probably the biggest in human
history. Institutions like the Catholic church or the NYT and the MSM (today)
are what communicate and sustain the culture (whether you agreed with them or
not). This is what the internet has broken. It takes time for new institutions
to form but that is the process that is underway right now and that process
will probably take decades.

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thwarted
This entry in how the unthinkable unfolds doesn't seem to fit with the others
in that same paragraph (because the others, while unthinkable, are consistent
with experience), and stands out to me:

 _Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits._

Other than people exploiting inefficiencies through having a monopoly, I can't
think of one case where reduction of inefficiencies also reduces profit. The
problem is that those who thought that were willing to make changes, as this
article points out, but not the kind of changes that would exploit the
increases in efficiencies.

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freejoe76
"The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to
subsidize the Baghdad bureau." I know this is figurative language, but Shirky
made a bad choice -- Wal-Mart doesn't advertise in newspapers much. They
experimented with a large push three years ago, and decided it wasn't
worthwhile. ( source:
[http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display...](http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002312854)
)

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dschoon
Irrespective of whether you agree with all the points here--and there are many
thoughtful ones--let's all take a moment to agree the writing here is
excellent.

~~~
mattchew
Very good writing. You have to distrust yourself a little after reading an
article like this. Am I persuaded by the message, or charmed by the style?

