Do you remember newspapers?
Clay Shirky’s piece Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable is worth all the links it’s been getting:
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
He’s writing specifically about print journalism, but it’s hard not to extrapolate the argument to all our paid and unpaid media. What does television look like ten years from now? We don’t know. We scramble to establish bulwarks and business models, all the while quietly suspecting that we’re going to guess wrong.
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.
Shirky’s article is a great candidate for the Readability bookmarklet, by the way.
Articles
March 20th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
You just introduced me to Readability! I absolutely love it!!!!
March 20th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
With all your biased news sources in the US you guys kinda need a reboot anyway. As far as “real news” goes, impartial and without sponsors or ad sales is the only way to go.
March 20th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Hey, that glass looks half-empty.
Really, what this article is supporting but not necessarily saying is that, for instance, the motion picture industry doesn’t have to exist — and even if it does continue to exist, it certainly doesn’t have to do so in anything resembling the form it does now. Or did even just ten or fifteen years ago.
There’s a reason why almost every movie made these days features a variation on some idiot in tights and a cape. Increasingly in the digital age, movies play out their profitability very, very quickly. 4,000 screens, day-and-date, 65% second-weekend drop — all this stuff is de rigeur now. After that, the earning potential of the movie dissolves into some combination of the white noise of the media landscape and (to a growing degree) a handful of .torrent files. But grown-ups don’t flock to see movies on opening weekend the way 18 year-olds do, so you don’t see many grown-up movies anymore — for the simple reason that they don’t do well. Hell, Michael Clayton didn’t even crack $50M domestic (and did even less internationally), and that was an Oscar-nominated picture with George Damned Clooney in the lead.
As for independent film, there’s a brilliant(ly ironic) quote by Steven Soderbergh in the sex, lies and videotape book where he says that he would have to make a completely unwatchable piece of shit in order to not make back his budget (which was, what, $1.2 million?).
It’s brilliantly ironic because no unknown indie filmmaker would dare think that today. The maker of Sundance winner Ballast pulled out of his distribution deal to release it independently because the advance from the distributor was $75,000. $75,000. (For those who don’t know, never mind the vagaries of distribution accounting: all you need to know is that the advance is probably all the money you’ll ever see.)
John August, a hugely successful screenwriter, made a pretty good “indie” film, with a cast probably better than any you’d ever be able to put together — you can use his handy search feature here to piece together your own post-mortem on indie film profitability.
Those who are surfing a little closer to the front of the digital/technological wave find it frighteningly easy to imagine a world in which it’s impossible to make any serious money off of digital content, in a world where digital content is all there will be. After all, it’s not like a whole bunch of really smart people haven’t been trying for, oh, a decade or so now to monetize digital content and haven’t yet been able to figure out how to freaking do it. At least not properly, or successfully, or on any consistent scale.
So, what, this means movies are going to go away? Sure, newspapers and journalism are important, but we’re always going to want television shows and movies, aren’t we? Aren’t we?
Well sure. But reality television is cheap, disposable, and hardly worth pirating.
As for movies, probably better think about ponying up another year’s dues for the First-Weekend Cape-and-Tights Club.
March 20th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Oops — I meant to throw this in as a footnote, too:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i9f8484a4bda6cf84030c3fc133f5f1c2
Particularly relevant is the part where Morgan Spurlock compares DVD royalties to digital royalties.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Did you see this? I haven’t vetted this article at all, but it implies a future I could accept:
Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:52 am
As the daughter of a small newspaper publisher, I appreciate this link!
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Also check out Surowiecki’s New Yorker piece from a few months back:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/12/22/081222ta_talk_surowiecki
“You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” indeed may not be a viable business model, but that’s exactly what we’ll be saying.
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Oh, another good link. This one is David Simon wondering out loud about the future of citizen journalism, and reporting without newspapers: David Simon’s “In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police”
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:23 am
Technology is supposed to make life better, and it often does, but we have reached a point in our technological development where we need to do some serious low-tech thinking about what the market does well and what the market does poorly. Unbiased, thoughtful, newspaper and television news is important in a free society (or, really, any society). The quality of TV news has been in sharp decline for years precisely because of the need to make news entertaining enough to get the ratings and therefore the revenue needed to make keeping the news on the air a good business proposition. We all suffer in the process. That it is possible in the year 2009 for a significant percentage of our population to believe that the world was literally created in six days, scientific evidence be damned, or for CNN to run extensive coverage, as I’m told they did, on Chris Brown and Rihanna, is appalling.
There are some things the market doesn’t do well. It doesn’t do anything well that’s low-profit, but high-value. We can let everything that’s of high-value but low-profit disappear, or we can begin to examine other models for providing these things. We’ve done it before with public education, the Interstate highway system, etc. — things deemed of such high value to society that they ought exist even if there weren’t a buck to be made.