"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

Clay Shirky has written, with much more erudition and clarity than myself, a piece on the familiar topic of the dying newspaper. Rather than suggesting industry-saving answers, or speculating on what will replace the medium were it to ever die off completely, Shirky concedes that he does not know where things are headed. He argues that no one does:

"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 [...]

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit 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. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public 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."

Please, take some time to read the whole thing. It's witty. Engaging. And surprisingly direct. I had never heard of Mr. Shirky until today, but I will be sure to check out his other (and there appear to be many) articles scattered about the web and housed on his site. Here's another little bite of his philosophy, taken from a speech delivered at SuperNova 2007: