Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” But 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. Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

[Not directly FOSS related, but a truly fantastic read in light of our discussions on (the quality of) journalism that we had in the forums recently. -- Sander]