Newspapers And Thinking The Unthinkable

'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.'

Hard to argue with that. Clearly written and well laid out. Me likey.

Excellent read thanks

Wow.. a well laid out argument and light on the current crisis.

Is LS a part of the solution?

it will be hard to light a furnace with out newspapers ... can always use my wide band bills though.

This is meeping awesome.

"You're gonna miss us when we're gone!" has never been much of a business model.

most excellent.

We read the hard copy of the local paper every morning over coffee. There's so much in it that's not on the online version. We also use the paper itself for cleaning, wrapping, lighting the BBQ, etc. Nothing else like it for cleaning glass...

You know... I never got the newspaper as cleaning material for windows. Doesn't the ink get on the glass. meep... if I pick up a modern paper with a mist of water on them, all the ink just sticks to ma hand.

Clay Shirky? That's the guy that wrote The Power of Lutefisk.

^^Who the fuk are you?

In the 90's I was a student at university studying mass communications. Much of this, minus some modern examples such as craigslist, has been foreseen for years. If the lecture was not about digital media and the consequences for traditional media, then it was a standard assumption for the topic at hand.

I assure you, I grasp the message is the media.

Nonetheless, we have electric and gas stoves, microwave ovens, magnetic induction burners, and ever-more exotic ways to cook food. But, sometimes, we choose to build a primitive fire to cook with. New technologies are often preferable to old methods, but they do not by themselves diminish the utility of the old technology.

The secondary uses that we've found for 'yesterdays news', like house training your dog, or starting that fire, will probably sustain some fragment of the industry.

Makes me wonder if, in fifty years we'll all cherish our acmeepulated yotabytes of spam files, which we utilize as some sort of ablative padding against futuristic data thieves.

Then again, we're runnin' outta trees anyway.

People still buy and ride horses, but few ride them to work.

Maybe, one day, should something terrible happen, we will go back to horses, carriages and plows, but not until then.

Why couldn't we come up with something better than horses, carriages and plows should something terrible happen?

because you touch yourself at night

I'm not zoned for horses. Can I ride vladtweano to work? Oh wait, he doesn't know where he's going.

I grasp the message is the media.

I have always thought that this is actually very stupid, the message is the message.

meep newspapers. We can make new ones after we've eradicated the zombies. For now, just keep your guns clean and wrap your fish in magazines.

Nomination for Hall of Fame