Comments on: Clay Shirky’s bracing dystopianism

By: This week in media musings: Shirky speaks, and three new projects to watch | Mark Coddington

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:30:26 +0000

[...] his talk is worth a listen (or a read). Not a ton of opinion has congealed around the talk yet, but Dan Kennedy is struck by bleakness of Shirky’s vision, and Tim Kastelle says two of the experiments to [...]

By: free news? « Business Models « Innovation Leadership Network

free news? « Business Models « Innovation Leadership Network — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:50:20 +0000

[...] the full talk. Dan Kennedy is one of the people to pick up the themes of Shirky’s talk, and his summary includes this section: “It may be that we’re seeing advertising priced at its real value for [...]

By: Strange Attractor » Blog Archive » links for 2009-09-24

Strange Attractor » Blog Archive » links for 2009-09-24 — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:30:45 +0000

[...] Media Nation » Clay Shirky’s bracing dystopianism Kevin: Dan Kennedy blogs about a Clay Shirky Presentation: With newspapers supplying about 85 percent of accountability journalism, Shirky said that what we need are a large number of small experiments to try to make up some of the gap. He divided those experiments into three parts: [...]

By: gmoke

gmoke — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:27:55 +0000

Shirky talked about two scales for the rise of corruption due to lack of journalism, small town and county or regional.

Here in Cambridge, MA I know that the Globe, Herald, Metro, and Phoenix don’t regularly cover Cambridge politics. Neither, really, do the Cambridge Chronicle or Cambridge Tab. Robert Winters has been doing his online Cambridge Civic Journal for a decade or more. It used to be that new reporters for the Chronicle would talk to him to get the lay of the land and the paper would link to him. Now neither is happening. If you want to know about Cambridge nitty gritty Cambridge Civic Journal (and probably a few other bloggers) are it.

By: Clay Shirky: Let a thousand flowers bloom to replace newspapers; don’t build a paywall around a public good » Nieman Journalism Lab

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:14:03 +0000

[...] with his ideas, he brought in a few new wrinkles, which have already been the subject of commentary around the [...]

By: Local Editor

Local Editor — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:01:11 +0000

“Anytime you see law enforcement busting some corrupt municipal scheme, you see the failure of local journalism which could have known, should have known, probably did know, but which backed away in ignorant bliss.”
Personally, I don’t back away in ignorant bliss, I just don’t have the resources to devote to one story, no matter how big.
A damn shame, I admit.

By: Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:35:58 +0000

“News organizations funded by money unconnected to commerce.” Doesn’t exist.

Of course it does. Underwriting — yes, advertising — is just one leg of public radio’s funding, the others being listener contributions, foundation grants, and government funding.

By: amused

amused — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:45:00 +0000

As for the price of advertising, it all comes down to the cost of delivering the audience, and for newspapers, that audience has been delivered by presenting a compelling product that you need daily. Are advertisers subsidizing bureaus in Beruit? No more than they’re subsidizing old Joe and his daily trek to the cop shop. Would circulation fall if old Joe was gassed? Yes, and by a lot. Would circulation fall if the Beruit bureau was shut? Not by much, more probably it would fall among the more highly-educated subscribers with more discretionary income, which makes the buy less attractive for advertisers.

Rare indeed is the product introduced in America without mass appeal advertising. Newspapers have been a pretty cost effective way of getting the word out.

By: amused

amused — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:27:45 +0000

“News organizations funded by money unconnected to commerce”

Doesn’t exist.

Nobody is heaping money on reporters out of good citizenship. It’s pay for plug.

WBUR and WGBH are as sales oriented as any commercial broadcast facility. They just call them grant announcements instead of spots, and retain the right to run beg-a-thons to make their quarterly or monthly(sometimes it seems like weekly or hourly) budgets.

As for the pending doom of “casual endemic corruption” caused by non-existent or ineffective small town papers, it’s already here.

Most 10,000 small town papers depend so much on locally generated ad revenue they don’t do much poking.

The biggest threats to small town papers is 20 years old and comes more from malls and the resulting withering of downtown, homegrown commerce than from the Internet. The chain stores buy national and regional media, not the local Daily Star Leader-American. The trend toward chain retail has either killed small town papers or rendered them next to irrelevant for anything other than wedding news, high school sports scores and funerals.

Anytime you see law enforcement busting some corrupt municipal scheme, you see the failure of local journalism which could have known, should have known, probably did know, but which backed away in ignorant bliss

By: Susan Currie Sivek

Susan Currie Sivek — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:42:40 +0000

Many small newspapers, especially in suburbs around larger cities, have been purchased by conglomerates as part of a geographic consolidation strategy. For example, in the Austin area, almost all the suburban papers are owned by Cox, which also owns the Austin American-Statesman (for now). So as the conglomerates go, so may go their small-town subsidiaries. I don’t know if that’s Shirky’s reasoning or not, but it could be a factor.