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Posted on March 18, 2009 | tags

 
 

Politics: We’re late to the Clay Shirky newspapers bandwagon, but he’s right

  • He’s right, you know Shirky makes this argument that all the stuff that the newspaper industry is doing right now is essentially trying to prop up an unsustainable model ruined by the Internet. Well, yeah. It’s the nature of creative destruction, something I wrote about a couple of months ago. But despite this, the content itself is more popular than ever. We read it because we love it. Even when we bitch and moan about the bias, we secretly love it.
  • Nothing will work Shirky’s main point: Experiment like crazy. Fail. Lose your shirt. Because you might eventually come up with a new type of thread which is a lot better than the one that held together your crappy shirt. I’d like to think that I got his point without having to be told it bluntly. I think a lot of people I know didn’t really get his point until it hit them in the face so hard that they couldn’t stop staring and they felt stung. It’s creative destruction. Don’t fight it.
  • Everything might work My friends are getting laid off, event the ones outside the newspaper industry. Newspapers are getting closed. The media feels like a watchdog that’s running out of sweet, sweet kibble. And it’s not because kibble’s in short supply – it’s because it’s getting dumped into a different bowl and it has a slightly different taste. It’s not going back into the old bowl. And you’re going to starve to death eating stale kibble. source