Why We Must Shift Our Attention from “Save Newspapers” to “Save Society”

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When we shift our attention from “save newspapers” to “save society,” the imperative changes from “preserve current institutions” to “do whatever works”—and what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19-year-old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14-year-olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University’s graduate program in interactive telecommunications, has written extensively about the Internet since 1996. His essays on the online experience have been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Wired, and Harvard Business Review. His critically acclaimed book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizationswas published by Penguin in 2008. Excerpted from a post on the author’s website (March 13, 2009); www.shirky.com.

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