Momma said wonk you out
Clay Shirky has a brilliant essay that thinks the unthinkable. "The people committed to saving newspapers," he writes, "[demand] to know 'If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?' To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke."
Be careful: That's not to say there's no model for The New York Times. We're not going to lose the news that everyone wants. Americans will not be deprived of Gallup poll numbers or Stupid Politician Tricks or write-ups of the Obama administration's financial regulation plans. Quite the opposite: The trend is to have more of that news from more different sources than at any other point in human history. Rather, we're going to lose the news that few people want. There's no obvious model for the Baltimore Sun. We're losing the reporting that's subsidized by the audience that comes for the national news coverage but does not result in stories that large audiences are actually interested in reading. The local stories and targeted investigations. The stuff that wasn't read but really mattered.
The news business, we all agree, is an inefficient enterprise. But it has benevolent inefficiencies. Not every story in the paper maximizes readership and thus advertising revenue. The low-readership stories, however, aren't misfires. They're aimed at a different audience: Empowered elites. They make the political system aware of problems, or they alert the political system to the fact that other people are aware of problems. A story uncovering Medicare payment fraud, for instance, is not an effort to capture the largest possible readership but to force the relevant regulators to act. The intended audience is about four dozen people, and the hundreds of thousands of subscribers who don't really care about that article but nevertheless see it are the leverage forcing the four dozen to act.
As the business becomes more streamlined, however, it is jettisoning these inefficiencies. If you have to sell the news -- rather than sell a local advertising monopoly -- you can't put resources into stories that don't perform. And so you won't. The Politico is a good model for congressional coverage but a bad model for investigative content. The response to that problem by many is that we must save newspapers. But on this, I agree with Shirky. We can't save newspapers. Not as currently constructed. And nor should that even be the goal.
"Society doesn't need newspapers," writes Shirky. "What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead. When we shift our attention from 'save newspapers' to 'save society', the imperative changes from 'preserve the current institutions' to 'do whatever works.' And what works today isn't the same as what used to work."
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