Says Clay Shirky, in an article everyone seems to be linking to today:
It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
and
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
Take time to read the full thing, if you’re interested in what it looks like to be in the middle of a revolution about, amongst other things, publishing and journalism.
On a similar level, I’m reminded of what Fake Steve Jobs had to say about the music industry:
The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution. They’ve got big warehouses and they control the shipment of little plastic boxes that happen to have music in them.
Old industries are dying, and it’s anyone’s guess what’s going to take their place. I thought it was exciting living through the end of the Cold War, seeing Nelson Mandela freed and the end of apartheid, and then the year 2000. I suspect the mainstreaming of the Internet will be more interesting still.
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