Publishing and awareness
It is indeed hard to overestimate the impact of the web. The web has made it far easier for far more people to create a scalable vehicle to provide what they know to anyone who wants to hear it. That's a huge change. But that change has done nothing to the laws of human attention. It could be that your blog is potentially more influential than your cardboard sign, but in most cases, no-one is reading either. The problem of getting heard is still there.
I think Dan Carlin had a lot of valuable things to say in this podcast. The gist is that the news business began repudiating ownership of stories long before the web. They started reporting on each others' news stories in order to be fast. Rewriting stories from other sources was a cheap way for the news business to eat its own seed corn (its credibility) in exchange for pumping some viewership numbers. The whole vapidity and blow-dried nature of modern American news is simply an extension of that practice.
All this makes me think several things.
It will be no sorrow to see modern stenographic news die. They earned it and richly deserve it.
The death of the late-twentieth-century news system will leave a lot of fertilizer in which to grow new news businesses.
There will never again be 1000 news outlets all purporting to cover national news (while in reality just retyping each others stories). There will probably be just a handful.
News will fragment, with the unbundling proceeding at a breakneck pace for things like sports and business news first (where there is a possibility people will pay for content), and political and local last.
Reporters and advertisers will be more likely to speak directly to the public rather than bundling their work, but there will always be synergy in that bundle, especially if there are a few dominant venues in which news is consumed.
There has been speculation over which few English-language global news organizations will survive. A few years ago, a reasonable prediction would have beeen that CNN, the New York Times, Fox, the BBC, and probably a few other big newspapers were sure bets. Now I'm not so sure. It would seem that there are no existing news organizations willing to see into the future and make the changes necessary to survive the transition. That's really discouraging, because the continuity of established voices (like the New York Times) is important. You can go out and start a news company, but you can't go out and start the New York Times. It takes decades. ¶ 5:18 PM
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Clay Shirky:
"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."Well, many of the physical obstacles, sure. But being heard remains very difficult. After all, making something "available" to the public has been possible as long as there's been markers and cardboard.
It is indeed hard to overestimate the impact of the web. The web has made it far easier for far more people to create a scalable vehicle to provide what they know to anyone who wants to hear it. That's a huge change. But that change has done nothing to the laws of human attention. It could be that your blog is potentially more influential than your cardboard sign, but in most cases, no-one is reading either. The problem of getting heard is still there.
I think Dan Carlin had a lot of valuable things to say in this podcast. The gist is that the news business began repudiating ownership of stories long before the web. They started reporting on each others' news stories in order to be fast. Rewriting stories from other sources was a cheap way for the news business to eat its own seed corn (its credibility) in exchange for pumping some viewership numbers. The whole vapidity and blow-dried nature of modern American news is simply an extension of that practice.
All this makes me think several things.
It will be no sorrow to see modern stenographic news die. They earned it and richly deserve it.
The death of the late-twentieth-century news system will leave a lot of fertilizer in which to grow new news businesses.
There will never again be 1000 news outlets all purporting to cover national news (while in reality just retyping each others stories). There will probably be just a handful.
News will fragment, with the unbundling proceeding at a breakneck pace for things like sports and business news first (where there is a possibility people will pay for content), and political and local last.
Reporters and advertisers will be more likely to speak directly to the public rather than bundling their work, but there will always be synergy in that bundle, especially if there are a few dominant venues in which news is consumed.
There has been speculation over which few English-language global news organizations will survive. A few years ago, a reasonable prediction would have beeen that CNN, the New York Times, Fox, the BBC, and probably a few other big newspapers were sure bets. Now I'm not so sure. It would seem that there are no existing news organizations willing to see into the future and make the changes necessary to survive the transition. That's really discouraging, because the continuity of established voices (like the New York Times) is important. You can go out and start a news company, but you can't go out and start the New York Times. It takes decades. ¶ 5:18 PM
