Clay Shirky on the End of Newspapers
From Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:
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.
Of course, that brings up the question: how are we going to replace newspapers? To which Mr. Shirky responds:
[This] is what real revolutions are like…When someone demands to know how we are going to 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 lied to.
This is a fan-damn-tastic article, and the quotes above are only two of the many nuggets that Shirky digs up. Hands-down, the best article I’ve read on the topic. A must-read.