The Inevitable Demise of the Newspaper

By Paul Craft | May 5, 2009 at 1:24 am
shorpy

Newsies in Newark, 1909. Image via Shorpy.

That old stalwart of the American public sphere, the daily printed newspaper, is going by the wayside – fast.

At least, according to Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, writer, and expert on the internet, networks, and e-business models. (Evgeny Morozov mentions Shirky in his recent Boston Review article, “Texting Toward Utopia.”)

In a provocative recent essay posted to his weblog, Shirky argues that newspapers were doomed from the first days of the internet.

During the 1990’s, a new, vastly more efficient, and completely free model for distributing the news emerged. As a result, the old profit-making schemes never stood a chance. His best quotes after the jump.

Many people claim that newspapers could have saved themselves, if only they had created a new model that stemmed the tide of free information that emerged in the late 1990’s. Shirky, however, begs to differ:

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 plan but several.

The daily print paper is destined to die, then. It simply cannot compete. Journalism’s form will change, but the craft will live on:

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.

Filed under: Current Events and Issues | 2 Comments »

2 Comments on “The Inevitable Demise of the Newspaper”

  1. 1 BR Footnote » Blog Archive » The Inevitable Demise of the Newspaper, Pt. II said at 5:06 pm on May 10th, 2009:

    [...] even cites the Clay Shirk piece that I discuss below. Rich is in firm agreement with Shirky’s main point; namely, that nobody knows the form which [...]

  2. 2 Gutenberg B. Bell said at 8:22 am on May 14th, 2009:

    Shirky is right that the printing press revolutionized information – by vastly expanding access to texts by the general public. Will the blogosphere be equally revolutionary? Shirky claims it will, but also reassures us that we will continue to have access to the same amount of vital information. So far, then, the potential of the blogosphere seems to have only uprooted the established hierarchy of media companies, not the way we think about information.

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