On Sat, 21 Mar 2009, Donal wrote:
> In support of the human-centric organisational power of Twitter vs
> blogs/newspapers.
Donal, I honestly have a problem understanding what you write about in
your posts. Are you an auto-generating text bot?
Gadi.
> (wayyy too apt to pass up and a bit long re-posting but here goes as I
> get chastised for just posting links sometimes):
> http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
>
> Aside: also Shirky's new book looks like fun: "Here Comes Everybody:
> The Power of Organizing Without Organizations", similar perhaps to
> 'The Starfish and the Spider' or 'Decentralism'.
>
> <snip_from
> http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/>
>
> Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
>
> Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating
> piracy of Dave Barry?s popular column, which was published by the
> Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the
> sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including
> the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a
> 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a
> teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself,
> because he loved Barry?s work so much he wanted everybody to be able
> to read it.
>
> One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy
> Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I
> remember Thompson saying something to the effect of ?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.? I think
> about that conversation a lot these days.
>
> The problem newspapers face isn?t that they didn?t see the internet
> coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that
> they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came
> up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with
> companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service
> that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to
> educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright
> law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed.
> Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio
> and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to
> convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable
> of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to
> achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue
> copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
>
> As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the
> merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better?
> Shouldn?t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and
> prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one
> scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that
> didn?t get much discussion in the nation?s newsrooms, for the obvious
> reason.
>
> The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to
> share content wouldn?t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would
> prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and
> therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread
> use. People would resist being educated to act against their own
> desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer
> online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain
> massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and
> software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor
> would they regard customers as enemies. DRM?s requirement that the
> attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable
> flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they
> want to share it would piss them off.
>
> 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. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the
> ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world
> was increasingly resembling 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.
>
> When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in
> an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have
> the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact
> happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be
> ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the
> fabulists has different effects on different industries at different
> times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most
> passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in
> which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
>
> * * *
>
> The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ?90s is that
> they were, at base, all the same plan: ?Here?s how we?re going to
> preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect
> copies!? The details differed, but the core assumption behind all
> imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the
> organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for
> publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and
> only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has
> degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by
> skeptical responses.
>
> ?The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!? (Financial
> information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients
> don?t want to share.) ?Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will
> work for us!? (Micropayments work only where the provider can avoid
> competitive business models.) ?The New York Times should charge for
> content!? (They?ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) ?Cook?s
> Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!?
> (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for
> content but for unimpeachability.) ?We?ll form a cartel!? (?and hand a
> competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
>
> 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.
>
> With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for
> industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized
> for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about
> a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves ?
> the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something
> available to the public ? has stopped being a problem.
>
> * * *
>
> Elizabeth Eisenstein?s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg?s invention,
> The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of
> her research into the early history of the printing press. She was
> able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era
> before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the
> pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book
> was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life
> in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg?s invention had started to spread.
> Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary
> languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and
> Martin Luther?s use of the press to reform the Church was upending
> both religious and political stability.
>
> What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored
> the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before
> or after the spread of print was child?s play; those dates were safely
> distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard
> question Eisenstein?s book asks is ?How did we get from the world
> before the printing press to the world after it? What was the
> revolution itself like??
>
> Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local
> languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil?
> Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of
> Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the
> relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith
> in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted
> while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost
> literally didn?t know what to think. If you can?t trust Aristotle, who
> can you trust?
>
> During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only
> revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the
> Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume
> along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change ? take a book
> and shrink it ? was in retrospect a key innovation in the
> democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more
> portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for
> all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
>
> That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken
> faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any
> given experiment isn?t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes
> stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can?t predict
> what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must
> be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the
> agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that
> whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient
> social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly
> replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
>
> And so it is today. 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.
>
> * * *
>
> If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most
> salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to
> set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg,
> limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the
> press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.
> In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper
> would eventually generate some small advantage ? a breaking story, a
> key interview ? at which point both advertisers and readers would come
> to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it
> easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense,
> than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would
> further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is
> either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one
> paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.
>
> For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been
> alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these
> economics. The expense of printing created an environment where
> Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn?t
> because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it
> about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing
> budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident.
> Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that
> way, since they didn?t really have any other vehicle for display ads.
>
> The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it
> into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity
> that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L?Osservatore Romano as
> being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers,
> publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural
> practice doesn?t make it any less accidental.
>
> The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by
> the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then
> everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag
> dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the
> block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to
> get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They?d
> never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
>
> * * *
>
> Print media does much of society?s heavy journalistic lifting, from
> flooding the zone ? covering every angle of a huge story ? to the
> daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This
> coverage creates benefits even for people who aren?t newspaper
> readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone
> from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to
> bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit
> society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at
> hand; ?You?re gonna miss us when we?re gone!? has never been much of a
> business model. So who covers all that news if some significant
> fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
>
> I don?t know. Nobody knows. We?re collectively living through 1500,
> when it?s easier to see what?s broken than what will replace it. The
> internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than
> half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the
> developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even
> the revolutionaries can?t predict what will happen.
>
> Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the
> potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The
> answer you?d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation:
> ?Mailing lists can be powerful tools?, ?Social effects are
> intertwining with digital networks?, blah blah blah. What no one would
> have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened:
> craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of
> craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it.
> Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a
> part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments
> are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.
>
> In craigslist?s gradual shift from ?interesting if minor? to
> ?essential and transformative?, there is one possible answer to the
> question ?If the old model is broken, what will work in its place??
> The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the
> time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will
> seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo
> volumes did.
>
> Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it?s been Wal-Mart
> and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it?s been Richard Mellon Scaife.
> Increasingly, it?s you and me, donating our time. The list of models
> that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like
> ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can?t be expanded to cover any general case,
> but then nothing is going to cover the general case.
>
> 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.
>
> We don?t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could
> be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or
> Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of,
> working on something we won?t recognize as vital until a decade hence.
> Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism
> is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in
> a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the
> past.
>
> 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
> journalism we need.
> </snip>
>
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