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

Coverage of world news on US media

Saw this video on the "From the Frontline" blog. Worth a watch. What I wonder after watching it is - if there is interest in international news coverage, as the video suggests, why aren't the news networks covering it? Is it that it's just become too expensive and it's better to use the wire agencies? Is it because news organisations have been bought up by other companies who think foreign coverage is a luxury not worth having? What are the sources of the problems??

So is it all doom and gloom?

 I've been collecting bits and pieces here and there about online news media and traditional print and broadcast media, and how the integration between the two is or is not happening.

It's all secondhand stuff really, but I thought I'll collect them all together in one blog ...

So why "brave new world"? It has a negative connotation I suppose, because of Adolf Huxley's book. But does the advent of the internet necessarily mean the demise of journalism? Are we all focusing on the wrong issues? Does an online news website have to be "Kylie's Bum" journalism (as one newspaper colleague said) to be finanically viable (let alone successful)??