We subscribe to the Wall Street Journal (it's changed under News Corp.; we don't plan to renew) and our carrier just outright gives us the San Jose Mercury News every so often. I don't know if it's an articulated prime-the-pump marketing ploy or it's just easier for the carrier not to have to keep careful track, or something else.
But the Mercury News is pathetic compared to its former bulk. It's tiny--Saturday, October 17, 2009 was 61 pages in six sections: Local, 8 pages; Sports, 7 pages; Business, 5 pages.
Clay Shirky is back--he spoke at the Shorenstein Center September 22nd on the subject of newspapers. He considered various strategies for funding local reporting. The full transcript includes some very smart observations, as usual.
He talks about Craigslist and Monster, et. al., cutting into newspaper's ad model. His point is that you need to see it from the consumer's perspective, not the newspaper's. "If you want to list a job or sell a bike, you don't go to the place that's printing news from Antananarivo and the crossword puzzle. You go to the place that's good for listing jobs and selling bikes."
He predicts worse times ahead for newspapers before things get better. He said:
Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption. Without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they're shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.
I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.
Shirky describes the features of a "journalistic ecosystem" in order to achieve the kind of "accountability journalism" that we've grown accustomed to in the new world order.
The coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it’s industrial. Which is to say, if you’re running a website and somebody’s on your website and they've just done a crossword puzzle and they seem to really like it, what’s the next thing you’re gonna show them? Is it news from Tegucigalpa? No. It’s another crossword puzzle, because that’s the only thing you can.
Shirky explains that this means, essentially, that "the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is [now] made by the consumer and...not by the producer." The problem is that everyone may choose to receive only things they already know that they agree with--Nicholas Negroponte's The Daily Me--and it devolves into an echo chamber. Shirky observes that it seems that readers get this concept and value expert editorial judgment and are interested in serendipity. But they are not buying into the idea of a single omnibus publication any longer.
"You don't go to the [New York] Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. ...the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience."
Shirky also says that "Syndication makes no sense in a world of URLs." (He knows how to coin a phrase, doesn't he?) Why should I sell you my content so you can build an audience for your site when I can more easily host my own content and build my own audience?
He says that any kind of paywall, micropayment, or pay per view scheme would make it "a violation of contract to make use of the news." You have to prevent the audience's ability to act as a publisher in order for that business model to work.
Shirky introduced the idea of people coming together for their own good, like open source software, rather than as a business at all. "Things in the market are created when revenues can reliably exceed expenses."
He ended his talk by agreeing with me :-). He said: "We should really be transferring our concern to the production of lots and lots of smaller, overlapping models of accountability journalism, knowing that we won’t get it right in the beginning and not knowing which experiments are going to pan out."
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