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:
Maybe I am moving a little off topic, but this post has been building in me over the last week and I just had to let it out. I previously wrote about the publishing industry's resistance to their changing marketplace- traditional newspapers and other publishing entities railing against lost advertising dollars and emerging troublesome internet journalism -but, I perhaps should have noted that they are far from alone in their fight. Traditionalists in the film, television and software industries are all struggling to come to terms with the horrifying openness of their new world.
And then there is music.
The big music labels and the RIAA were among the first to show their unwillingness to adapt when they started dropping lawsuits on twelve year olds in Wisconsin and old grannies for downloading a handful of mp3s. I don't intend to comment on their litigiousness, however. Rather, I am taking issue with their product launch model.
Grizzly Bear are a relatively 'big' band, by most standards: they opened for Radiohead on their last stadium tour and are capable of headlining large shows on their own, they make the standard talk-show television appearances on a regular basis, and each new album is met with a swarm of hype on and offline. They are a very good band with a substantial popular and critical following. Cool, right? They also have a new album due out on May 26th.
Want to hear it? No problem! Just google it. Veckatimest leaked two weeks ago. ... Three months before its drop date.
The current method of release is ridiculous. The band probably finished work on this album early in the year, handed it in to the label and were told to sit on their hands for awhile. The label then sent out a few copies out for review purposes and let one or two mp3s hit the Hype Machine, through bloggers or official downloads. Those lead singles sounded great and the fan got excited. Anticipation was high. The first reviews were glowing. Did the label honestly believe this album would stay under wraps until May?
This leak, like the other hundreds of leaks in the last five years, highlights the inadequacy of the music industry's business model. The Radiohead experiment proved that online downloads will not necessarily cannibalize later in-store sales, so long as the band has strong brand equity and the released product is high quality. So why not stagger the releases? Lead with online, hit the brick and mortar stores at the scheduled date. Even if the label is not comfortable with that idea, now that their consumers are downloading a poorly ripped, unofficial version of the album from torrents, why not provide them with a legitimate alternative? In my opinion, Veckatimest should have been up on iTunes, or the band's website or anywhere(!) as soon as the leak occured.
You can either rail against the internet, or you can learn how to make it work for your business. The music industry cannot expect its old models to work the way they did fifteen years ago.
Just as a bonus, here is Grizzle Bear performing 'Deep Blue Sea' during a show with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Check it:
In the fall of 2008, Judy Wolff, Chairman of the Board of Trustees that oversees the publication of The Christian Science Monitor, announced that the paper would be ending its daily print production and moving all output online. She explains: "We plan to take advantage of the Internet in order to deliver the Monitor's journalism more quickly, to improve the Monitor's timeliness and relevance, and to increase revenue and reduce costs. We can do this by changing the way the Monitor reaches its readers."
The Monitor has been succesfully printing for over a century, so what has changed to force them online? The answer may lie in eMarketer's recent report on the ailing health of the newspaper industry.
eMarketer paints a grim picture for newspapers across North America; with classified advertising sales leeched by craigslist, the growing popularity of online journalism stealing readerships and the handicap of large overhead and distribution costs these new competitors operate without.
Outlets unwilling to take a bold step into the unknown, as the Monitor has done, are feeling the pain. In addition to the litany of job cuts described in the eMarketer report, last week saw the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut nearly 200 jobs, and Paper Cuts (a new blog that intends to track industry job losses in 2009) is reporting similar losses at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Tulsa World.
Compounding the challenges described in the eMarketer document, figures within the industry have been aiming inflexible (and at times, antagonistic) rhetoric in the direction of their new online competition, deriding the internet as a bastion of journalistic dishonesty. Case in point, H.G. Bissinger's verbal ambush (language NSFW) of Deadspin editor Will Leitch on an episode of HBO's Costas Now from 2008.
The writing on the wall (and the message plainly laid out by eMarketer) should be clear. The audience newspapers have depended on for so long has changed, and as such, the industry must change with them. There will be a market for print journalism for many years to come, but likely not in the form it has previously held. Flexibility (as exercised by Ms. Wolff and the Monitor) will be necessary in order to see other journalistic institutions through the transition. The resistance Mr. Bissinger has shown online sports writers exemplifies the closed mindest that could serve as print journalism's death knell. Rather than attacking the new competition, it may be wiser to learn from their growing success; adopting the applicable methods of value addition that have helped them gain readership.
