The Times they are a-changing

When it comes to media especially newspapers, it would appear that the classic Bob Dylan song got it right. The Times they are a-changing, most definitely. They are changing now and the changes are likely to be the most revolutionary of the last 100 years.

Andrew Keen writing at The Independent on new media posted this last Friday 20 March:-

America’s digerati has been abuzz all this week with the gloomy words of a couple of the country’s most lucid Internet prophets. First came a speech last Friday by the author Steven Johnson at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin TX, then came an essay on Saturday by New York University digital media scholar Clay Shirky. Their words addressed the future of digital news; and both men delivered the bleakest of news to print journalists already under siege from the economic crisis afflicting almost all American newspapers.

Their media may have been different, but their shocking messages were the same: newspapers are history, the two visionaries agreed. The traditional business is no longer viable, Shirky and Johnson both announced; newspapers are being replaced by futuristic digital news networks that will barely resemble their archaic print ancestors.

He  followed this up with some comment on what Shirky and Johnson were saying.

Adam has previously posted 19 March on comments on the Shirky piece by Steve Coll at The New Yorker. However, back in January he commented on several articles related to changes in the newspaper business in a post called ‘Life, but not as we know it”. These seem even more relevant today, than they did then.

Keen’s column is well worth reading. When he, Shirky and Johnson write about newspapers  it is perhaps worth thinking as well about broadcast media. In this context the changes at TVNZ may well be the wrong ones. Perhaps TVNZ is re-structuring to cope with the old world, rather than the new digital world.

Keen concluded his piece with these remarks:-

Meanwhile, the real world continues to validate the accuracy of their depressing analysis.  Last week, for example, Hearst Corporation announced the closure of Seattle’s oldest newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer. And there were more staff cuts at a number of other newspapers including the San Diego Union-Tribune. Meanwhile Time Magazine identified the ten most doomed regional papers, a chilling list which included such historically august publications as the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Shirky wrote, “this what real revolutions are like.” They are invariably bloody and chaotic events in which “the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.” Non American journalists, publishers and editors should take note; like the unsentimental Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson, they must dare to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable.

As yet it seems to Adam that media in Australasia see the web as an adjunct and an alternative, rather than as the dyanamic change mechanism that it is in reality. Indeed, some media really do not seem to ‘get’ the internet at all.

We live as the Chinese curse would have it ‘In interesting times’. Certainly the times they are a-changing. This change will have major cultural impact as well as impact on the mechanism of information delivery.

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