Clay Shirky on newspapers

Clay Shirky has a great post for any organisation trying to navigate the Digital Chasm (I know we usually say "digital transition" as if it was all going to be nice and smooth and continuous, but that's part of his point, it isn't).  Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

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.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

I want you to think about that.  Here's what I wrote as a FriendFeed comment on the item: "Fundamentally it's an issue of the mental models of the pre-digital world not transferring over. In the physical world you may steal something because you want it, but more likely, you steal it because you want to make some money. People who steal may have no interest in what they're stealing, other than money. When the digital Law of Infinite Perfect Copies applies, there is no money in copying. That means the people who copy your content most passionately are people who LOVE YOUR PRODUCT."

I don't think media in particular has gotten its head around this.  In the digital world, when people like your product, some will buy, but many will share.  Both of these are expressions of engagement with your content.  People may switch seamlessly between buying and sharing - they may buy the DVDs, but BitTorrent episodes that aren't available on DVD yet.  They may watch legal clips online, and carry ripped content around on their iPods.  They.  Don't.  Care.  The industry has been trying over and over and over again to convince us that the person who in one instant is buying the DVD is a noble upstanding citizen supporting industry, and the EXACT SAME PERSON who an instant later copies some music and gives it to a friend is an evil pirate who hates capitalism and is stealing food from artists' children.  This is insane.  This is not true.  Stop doing that, it doesn't work.  What part of Infinite Perfect Copies do you not understand?

More from Shirky

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. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times.

If digital blows up the library, the solution is not to say "the library is really really important, this can't be happening".  The solution is to provide real services in the real world that patrons actually use.  Not the services you think they should use, services that they actually want.

Three years ago, I wrote "is the research library obsolete?" and its followup "paved paradise: the future of (a particular type of) research library?".  The point of which is: if your main business is serving up digital content (PDFs of articles from licensed journals) remotely to researchers sitting at their desks -- which I realise is certainly not the case if you're a public library, but which is the case for my library -- then the entire enterprise you've built up, the big building designed for visitors who no longer come, the carefully protected stacks full of paper, that entire enterprise is dying and you'd better have a plan for what your library does next in the real world.  Trying to pretend that basic discovery and access to digital content are a differentiator (let alone ascribing value to stacks of print) in a world of Google Scholar and ScienceDirect is fantasy, not reality.  If you don't provide more than publisher sites + free search can offer, you're dead (a situation which now faces an organisation I am rather familiar with).

To conclude with some forceful words from Shirky

When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

via FriendFeed

SIDEBAR: It's important to mention that one of the reasons for the current newspaper crisis, beyond the macroeconomic downturn, is that many of them, whether directed by moguls or corporations, were highly leveraged.  Empires built upon debt.  This sort of financial manuevering looks brilliant when credit is cheap and the economy is growing and the classified ads look like a license to print money.  No doubt each buyout and takeover was lauded in its day.  And it was of course just part of an overall pattern that loaded almost every part of the economy down with debt.  But nevertheless, when credit is hard to get and the economy is shrinking and the ad-based newspaper model is under threat, it looks idiotic.

UPDATE: One of Canada's two national newspapers, the Globe and Mail had a major feature on this topic today - Is democracy written in disappearing ink?

My comment on FriendFeed was: I'm concerned that, just as in the words of Churchill "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." that it is possible that "the mainstream media are the worst form of journalism except all the others that have been tried". Unfortunately, just because blogging *may be* worse, that doesn't mean blogging won't replace MSM.

Comments

[Jodi Schneider]

Thanks for connecting Shirky back up with the library. I've been thinking about that.

"When the digital Law of Infinite Perfect Copies applies, there is no money in copying." Have you read Better than Free?

Kevin Kelly asks: “When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?” His 8 answers:

1. immediacy
2. personalization
3. interpretation
4. authenticity
5. accessibility
6. embodiment
7. patronage
8. findability