(2012-11-27) Post Industrial Journalism

Clay Shirky, Emily Bell, and C W Anderson have written "PostIndustrialJournalism". This essay is part survey and part Manifesto, one that concerns itself with the practice of Journalism and the practices of journalists in the United States. It is not, however, about “the future of the news industry,” both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the News Industry anymore.

Joshua Benton gives a summary and criticism. It aims to bring together a variety of threads around where news is headed — at the levels of the individual journalist, the legacy news organization, and the startup — and paint a picture of the forces pushing adaptation on each.

Apr'2013 update: interview with Clay Shirky. What can also work is spinning out, and giving a great degree of independence to, new projects that aren’t expected to be tightly coupled with the mothership. Clayton Christensen has done a lot of work on this and argues that successful projects of Self Disruption almost always have the characteristic of being hidden from the main company... The last great hope for institutional change was to let the web people develop their own culture, and then bring them back into the company almost like a sourdough that helps to ferment innovation. That doesn’t work. You really have to let the people doing outside work be outside... A very harmful part of the conversation has focused on what is the solution without defining the problem. Usually, when people ask about solutions, they are really asking: 'How can we get back all the money that we have lost since 2005?' We wanted to say: You cannot... There’s no question that the market can never supply as much journalism as democracy demands... The one bit of new information that I wasn’t expecting at all when we worked on our report was when someone asked: “Tell me about your Content Management System.” And people would just explode in rage and fury.