The future of journalism is up for grabs

Fantastic item by a gent named Clay Shirky on the demise of the newspaper. If I can boil it down, the point it this: Publishers have known for a long time that what's happening now was a freight train bearing down on them. They tried any number of things to maintain their industrial-era newspaper structures in the digital age. Nothing worked, and those structures are now collapsing before us.

What replaces them? Nobody knows. The Internet is still in its relative infancy. It's critical that journalism -- not necessarily newspapers, as Mr. Shirky makes the distinction -- survive, and he believes it will, but contends no one can know what that survival will look like.

This has been part of my own thought process. I no longer have any confidence that journalism, at least in the near term, is a viable business where one can make a confident living. And, ultimately, in the midst of all the platitudes about a free society's need for good journalism, for me the most compelling thing of all is that I am not blessed with family wealth, so I have to have an income-generating skill to survive. Right now journalism isn't it. And no one knows when journalism will again become a way to make a confident living. And if it takes 10 years, well, I don't have 10 years. The only option is to find a new career. Not exactly what I had hoped for as a 40th birthday present, but it is what it is.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

-- MJM