In 1993 the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column on usenet; a 2,000-person mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
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 like, 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.
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the Internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early ’90s they came up with not just one scheme but several.
One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open Internet. Another approach was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, newspapers could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: educate the public about copyright law and sue those who break it, making an example of them.
In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable: that the ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow.
Walled-off content would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who 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 envisioning micropayments and lawsuits, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but as saviors.
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 disagree 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. One of the effects on newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan. The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments work only where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with qPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.)
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. There is no general model with which newspapers can replace the one the Internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for print 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 it solves–the difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public–has stopped being a problem.
Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, first published in 1979, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
What Eisenstein focused on, however, was not a description of what the world looked like before and after the spread of print–that’s child’s play, and all too typical in most historical texts on the subject. She chose instead to analyze how we got from one era to the next.
It was, as it turns out, chaotic. When the Bible was translated into local languages some people saw it as an educational boon, others as the work of the devil. Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same sort of response. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
Only in retrospect were experiments undertaken during the wrenching transition to print revealed to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, a Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume. What seemed like a minor change–take a book and shrink it–was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can be neither mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When people demand 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 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.
If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.
In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage–a breaking story, a key interview–at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus.
For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive, in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have its marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.
The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the Internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
People in the newspaper business often note that their labor benefits society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “you’re gonna miss us when we’re gone” has never been much of a business model.
It’s true that the print media do much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from teasing out every angle of a huge story to the grind of attending the city council meeting, in case something happens. This coverage is beneficial even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers.
So who will cover that city council meeting when the newspaper reporter on that beat loses her job?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. The Internet turns 40 this fall. Public access is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
Imagine, in 1996, asking some Net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then just a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools,” “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks,” etc. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: Craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Only in retrospect are experiments revealed to be turning points.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly bound together as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism.
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.
