The New News, the New Newspapers, and the Nieu Journalists

SHIRKY: 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.

SHOOT: I am an example of the Nieu Journalist. I have no journalistic training, but I have been educated by the internet, and also empowered, and published, principally by my own site [my own publishing platform] and then, via a slow process of displacement, throughout other media. The media consumers are become the new media, including its owners. The idea of centralised media is falling away, because the internet democratises like nothing else.

clipped from www.shirky.com 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. “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. That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.