Making a place for journalism in the electronic age
I know, I know. But this one is really good.
It’s a fabulous blog post by Clay Shirky, new media professor at New York University, on how technology has affected journalism. This will give you new perspective on where we are and how we got here.
His lede:
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
When the magnificent Sarah Slobin points you to an article, y’know, you read it now and thank her later.
Thank you, Sarah!
While Clay’s piece helps us understand better what we’re going through now, an all-star team put together by SND president Matt Mansfield and consultant Alan Jacobson will meet a week from today in D.C. to try to come up with a viable new business model.
Matt Mansfield and Alan Jacobson.
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They’re calling it RevenueTwoPointZero. The project’s web site states:
Unlike recent confabs of executives, editors and academics, we are hands-on professionals charged with delivering media solutions every day. And because we’re hands-on, we know how build to prototypes to demonstrate our ideas to the newspaper industry. We aim to do that by the end of the day on March 21st.
We reject the belief that media companies should pursue models based on pay-for-content plans or philanthropy. Instead, we believe the best hope for media companies to make money is the old-fashioned way — by earning it.
They hope to do this by creating an advertising-supported news product that can be delivered to an iPhone, finding a way to out-Craigslist Craigslist and by educating newspaper companies on how to better serve the advertising needs of locally-based small- and medium-sized businesses.
Hell, just the material already posted to the web site beats the snot out of the API closed-door “crisis summit” back in November. What a joke that was.