What Newspapers and Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia

By Clay Shirky

Nick Carr is right. Now what?

As new capabilities go, effortless distribution of unlimited perfect copies is a lulu. (Throw in low cost, accessibility to amateurs, and global reach, just for good measure.) Defending businesses based on scarce production is simply special pleading in the face of a change this epochal.

That’s not to say that the beneficiaries of the old system are above a bit of special pleading; indeed, there is a whole literature of newspaper publishers equating their falling revenues with social calamity.

To hear publishers tell it, they are deeply concerned about losing their audience, but the facts don’t bear this out. They’ve been losing their audience since 1984, the year readership first began shrinking (and ten years before the launch of the commercial web.) When their audience was shrinking but their ad revenues were growing, they were mum about social value. Now that the web means their audience is growing again but their ad revenues are falling, they’ve suddenly discovered their civic function. (Next stop: publishers lobbying for federal support on national security grounds. This will happen within two years.) MORE