Print ‘n’ Read: Clay Shirky’s Last Word

Clay Shirky, NYU adjunct professor and author of the book Here Comes Everybody, has written the most spectacularly devastating analysis of the newspaper mess I’ve ever read.

I offer his long blog post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” as my latest Print ‘n’ Read feature. PnRs, as both regular readers of this blog know, are online articles so important they are actually worth printing out on paper to read later. [Note unsettling irony that a seminal piece on digital journalism is best appreciated on paper.]

His central points: The disruptions that imperil the newspaper industry are driven by an irreversible cultural revolution; that fighting to sustain current structures with a new “business model” is futile; that nobody knows how journalism might be funded but that thousands of experiments might eventually produce answers.

Delightfully, Shirky manages to dismiss the dimwit fantasies of the  newspaper business conservatives with a deft combination of historical context and powerful insight that makes those who disagree seem not only hopelessly wrong, but foolish.

Passages crackle with aphoristic brilliance:

“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.” . . .

“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.” . . .

“The [high] expense of printing created an environment where [major newspaper advertisers like] Wal-Mart [were] 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.” . . .

“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.”

“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.” . . .

Maybe Shirky’s post should be turned into one of those “interactive training modules” newsrooms use to make sure all employees understand other important stuff, like sexual harrassment, diversity and libel. Employees who don’t score 80 percent on the quiz would have to repeat it.

Either that or they can be made to read the post with their eyes forced open as in another influential work of revolutionary futurism, A Clockwork Orange.