The end of newspapers

[16 March 2009]

By Rob Horning

Clay Shirky’s essay about the decline of newspapers is excellent on how they have ended up in their predicament.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.


What those working at newspapers couldn’t face was that the problem that publishing as an industry had developed itself to solve—how to overcome the expense of printing and distributing bundles of information—was no longer a problem at all thanks to the internet. A new industry to solve a new problem—how to pay for news gathering—must emerge.

But Shirky refuses to attempt to predict what that will be. He adopts a kind of anti-teleological stance, declaring that no one can know which experiments in news dissemination will take hold until after the fact. This is a wise and careful stance, but it ends up being tantamount to urging a kind of analytical passivity: We should just wait and see what shakes out, and then we will know what the right answer was to the problem of how journalists will be paid.


What “we need” is whatever we end up getting. So in a sense, we can’t possibly go wrong. All truly is best in this best of all possible worlds.

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