Newspapers R.I.P.???

Different business sectors have faced the digital revolution in very different ways. The music business has been virtually destroyed by it; mostly because it allowed and still allows its greed to dictate its every decision. Hollywood has embraced it and has tried to adjust to new profit centers and new business models. The book publishing business, perhaps having learned from the mistakes of the music business, has tried to get out ahead of change and tried to make digital books its own and in so doing is creating new, sometimes innovative opportunities.

But no business has approached digital with less intelligence, less vision or less strategic thinking than journalism. Arguably a business that could have been on the cutting edge, it has operated out of fear, ignorance and petulance. The results have been that once great beacons of journalism, like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, have been decimated. Perhaps the penultimate story about this is told by James O'Shea in his new book The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers.

My conversation with James O'Shea:

Click here to listen on iphone or ipad

Newspapers...again

Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine writes the speech that Eric Schmidt of Google should have given to the Newspaper Association of America this week.  Money quote:

You blew it!

You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of - as you call them, Mr. Murdoch - net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

Newspaper follow-up

The always prescient Michael Kinsley piles on to Jack Shafer's story below.  Let's stop all the hand wringing about newspapers.

Why Newspapers are irrelevant to Democracy

Todays must read.  Jack Shafer, in Slate, lays out the case for letting newspapers, even local ones, be allowed to die. It's a pretty compelling case.  Money quote:

Think I'm exaggerating? If you're a big proponent of democracy, you'll be interested to know that a majority of Americans don't care whether their local newspaper lives or dies. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month shows that fewer than half of Americans "say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community 'a lot.' " Hell, I'll bet that if you put the abolishment of newspapers on the ballot in a lot of cities, it just might pass.

Far from being yahoos, the Americans who thumbed their noses at newspapers in the Pew poll have a point. Even an excellent newspaper carries only a few articles each day that could honestly be said to nurture the democratic way. Car bomb in Pakistan? Drug war in Mexico? Flood in North Dakota? Murder in the suburbs? Great places to get Thai food after midnight? A review of the Britney Spears concert? New ideas on how to serve leftover turkey? The sports scores? The stock report? Few of these stories are likely to supercharge the democratic impulse.

Newspapers, the end or a new begining

As the daily newspaper fades off  into the sunset, two of best thinkers about all things digital opine on what may be ahead.

First, Clay Shirky.  A sample:

When someone demands to be told how we can 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.

Next, Steven Johnson. A sample:

I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.
That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial.
It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.