The imminent death of newspapers is a straight result of the driving forces behind what we call the Share Economy. Consumers love to share what they find interesting. But newspapers failed to adapt and instead tried to enforce their traditional business model to the new digital era. Clay Shirky draws a scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable by newspaper moguls but now turns out to be the just reality.
The ability to share content wouldn't shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM's requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
The newspaper industry today is more or less out of touch with reality.
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the '90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: "Here's how we're going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!" The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. 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.
The result is nothing less than a veritable revolution.
The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing.
Let's stop here and extend this kind of thinking to other industries, equally troubled, that is. That last sentence strikingly reminds me of bailed-out banks and other burdened financial institutions. Can't we draw a parallel between newspapers and banks that both failed to face reality?
And why stop at banks? Aren't car manufacturers in similar trouble? Jeff Jarvis (who will give a keynote talk at next09) applied his key question What Would Google Do? to the auto industry and suggested heresy:
I urged the car people to open up their design process and make it both transparent and collaborative. Car companies have no good way to listen to customers' ideas. My suggestion was sacrilegious because automakers have long been secretive about design. Design and surprise, they think, are their special sauce. That's why they cloak new models like classified weapons, setting off games of cat-and-car with photographers who try to scoop the secrets. Apart from the most fanatical car fan, do the rest of us still care? How could a car company again win our affection for its products and brands? By opening up, by making the process of producing cars transparent so it could involve customers, by turning out cars customers want because they had a chance to say what they want.
We are living in an age of digital revolution that has just begun. What's happening now, fueled by the internet and accelerated by a financial crisis that led to an economic crisis, is shaking industry after industry. It won't stop at newspapers, banks and cars. Jeff calls it The Great Restructuring. So maybe that would be a good headline for his upcoming keynote.
Photo: James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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