It’s not about print, it’s about journalism
In all this talk about print media dying, perhaps there’s one point we haven’t made clearly enough and often enough.
Clay Shirky tackles the issue in his blog which you can read here. It’s a long, overly long, academic and somewhat dry treatise on the paradigm shift of media but it does make some good points at the end.
He compares our current malaise to that of the 1500s and the introduction of the Gutenberg Press. As we know, the press had a transformative effect on the world, driving literacy and spreading ideas and, as it turned out, launching the porn industry with the introduction of erotic books, just as the porn drive the VCR, the DVD and the Internet. (I didn’t know that last part but it makes sense!)
The question, he says, is not what happened after the press was introduced but what was it like before and during the revolution? He suggests it was probably similar to the flux we’re experiencing now as the old world was forced to adjust and confront the new world.
His key point, though, and one I fully agree with, is that it is perhaps not newspapers or print which needs saving, since other mediums are probably more effective and less costly to convey information to mass markets, but the role of journalism.
Indeed, it is journalism which must be saved at all costs, even to the point of subsidizing newspapers and magazines. As I and others are saying, without journalism we will be stuck in an age of corruption, misinformation and waste by both the private sector and our levels of government.
Investigative reporting is expensive. It takes time and skill and the willingness to take risk.
Bloggers won’t have the time or the skills; Who else then will rise to the cause and pursue stories with the zeal and dogged determination of the The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, both of whom have run investigative pieces on their front pages over the last week or so.
Who else will point the finger at corporate greed as exhibited by Enron executives and more recently those at AIG who scooped $165 million in bonus into their pockets even as the company was tanking and looking for government hand outs?
In time, says Shirky, this will be solved. But the question left hanging, is how long and can we afford to wait until natural forces and technology have combined to create a new business model for robust journalism? And how many journalists, good, experienced, dedicated journalists, will have abandoned the craft, forced on to other careers because they need to feed their families?