Comments on: Clay Shirky: wrong about newspapers

By: Time to move the debate about journalism’s future on « The Martin Cloake blog

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:57:39 +0000

[…] One of my teaching colleges spoke of a frustration that “so much of the debate is consumed in negativity without giving any of the new young journos any interim navigating skills”, and I think some of that is driven by the tendency of so many journalists to re-invent themselves as expert commentators – something I refer to in the comments following a very good post by Adrian Monck in which he debunks some of the commentary. […]

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:06:26 +0000

Hooray! Great post. I couldn’t agree more with this statement:

“US newspapers began their relative decline because the lives of millions of Americans were changed by two things that defined the 20C - cars and television - and that decline started at the beginning of the 1970s.”

This is such a basic point — yet one that is so often ignored in the debates around the decline of newspapers.

By: Paul Seaman

Paul Seaman — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:46:20 +0000

Your take on this is good. I explore some more how Shirky is plain wrong on my PR blog here:

http://paulseaman.eu/2009/03/the-death-of-journalism-not-likely/

By: Individual as Brand - Sustaining news during the Unthinkable | the earley edition

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:47:02 +0000

[…] and Thinking the Unthinkable (which, for a differing view, has also been criticised none other than Adrian Monck) suggests the current situation newspapers are facing is similar to that of the introduction of the […]

By: Adrian Monck

Adrian Monck — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:18:34 +0000

@Andreas - I’m all for imaginative leaps, I just find the sweeping asides a bit annoying!

@codyk - Perhaps I’m being too gnomic. Car travel (and the suburbanisation it allowed) destroyed the market for evening papers in the US - they used to be the most profitable market segment. And before car travel people bought papers in the morning and evening…

The evening news on TV dealt a further blow to both evening papers, and also changed the news agenda of morning papers because it was able to effectively ‘beat’ or ‘obsolesce’ print deadlines.

So cars forced newspapers back into the morning, and television forced them to shift their content, making it less ‘timely’ . And that happened through the late 1950s and 1960s and the first indication of the decline hitting was 1971.

Seriously. No kidding.

By: codyk

codyk — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:11:48 +0000

Cars and TV.

Really?

No, seriously. You’re kidding, right?

By: Andreas Kluth

Andreas Kluth — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:29:19 +0000

I’m certainly not going to defend Clay Shirky wholesale, but I thought the overall point he was making was well taken: that we are probably at or near a point analogous to a time slightly nearer to Aldus Manutius than Gutenberg — ie, a point when things were/are already being destroyed but it was/is not yet evident what would/will replace it.

I love these sorts of exercises of the imagination (and also once opened a series of articles with a nod to Gutenberg.) They are really thought games of that sort that Einstein used for his breakthroughs.

Having said that, even Einstein only had five breakthroughs in his lifetime, and in our context I have yet to hear a plausible vision for our post-Aldus age…. ;)

By: martin cloake

martin cloake — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:53:36 +0000

Adrian,
You’ve hit on something here, which is that all too often commentary on how media is developing seems uncannily to lead towards the commentator offering a consultancy service - we’re all consultants nowadays aren’t we, lol? (I do like your take in “How did newspapers try to save themsleves” btw).

I think Clay Shirky’s piece was an interesting read, but not the revelation some seem to think. I’ve said a few times that there’s an obsession with form over content which doesn’t help us as we try to work in an evolving media world.

The basic issue I have with Shirky is that when he describes himself as someone who writes about “Systems where vested interests lose out to innovation,” he seems not to acknowledge that many of the same vested interests are still, in fact, running the show. New media technologies have democratised the media to a certain extent, but not as much as some people would like to think. Monopoly capitalism hasn’t changed.

By: Dilyan

Dilyan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 10:01:06 +0000

@Adrian - Not only will there be fewer newspapers in the future, but, because there will be so much fewer of them, their role and defining characteristics will change. Your criticisms of CS are all valid, but so is his underlying point: newspapers (as we know them) will disappear and be replaced by something that can hardly be gleaned from our current standpoint. That something or, very likely, one of those somethings may still be called a “newspaper” but it will not be the same thing we call that today.

By: Adrian Monck

Adrian Monck — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 06:32:34 +0000

@Adam - The Sunday Times Wine Club was never really going to be that killer future revenue stream…

@Ben - Agree esp. about US papers. The centralised UK media landscape is coming soon to the US, whether they like it or not - and it does have unavoidable consequences for the US democratic federalist tradition, but Americans have to address that politically, not by jeremiads on journalism.

(And the NY Times just has to make up its mind to stay in business long enough to be part of that centralised, national media.)

@Byron - a little elaboration with that comment? There’s a lot of things I don’t get…