Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/02/why-small-payments-wont-save-publishers/

The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. ...ja uskottava rahoituspohja, mutta se on eri stoori.

"Unfortunately for the optimists, micropayments — small payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism. "

Clay Shirky tells us why micropayments for news will not work.

save

Since 1993, people have been telling news executives that their business model is doomed.

<3 clay shirky

The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now.

what struck me, re-reading my younger self, was this: a dozen years ago, a kid who'd only just had his brains blown via TCP/IP nevertheless understood that the newspaper business was screwed, not because this was a sophisticated conclusion, but because it was obvious.

Shirky on how Twitter and social tools have enabled global focus on the Iran protests in a new way.

Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

reading @cshirky on twitter and Iran, fascinating. thanks :) http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/qa_with_clay_sh.php [from http://twitter.com/evrenk/statuses/2212437449]

Someone tweeted from Tehran today that "the American media may not care, but the American people do." That's a sea-change.

as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think - That push model of one message for all is an incredibly crappy way of linking supply and demand.

NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events.

"NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable."

Clay Shirky - a man who can tease out the issues that affect us in publishing with exquisite precision. change Journalism for Scholarly Publishing and you have the issues that face us today...

The hard truth about the future of journalism is that nobody knows for sure what will happen; the current system is so brittle, and the alternatives are so speculative, that there’s no hope for a simple and orderly transition from State A to State B. Chaos is our lot; the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures. Two of the most important are the changing natures of the public, and of subsidy. As Paul Starr, the great sociologist of media, has often noted, journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it’s also about assembling a public to read and react to those stories. A public is not merely an audience. For a TV show with an audience of a million, no one cares whether it’s the same million every week — head count rules. A public, by contrast, is a group of people who not only know things, but know other members of the public know those things as well. Both persistence and synchrony matter, because journalism is

This will not replace the older forms journalism, but then nothing else will either; both preservation and simple replacement are off the table. The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all.

"This will not replace the older forms journalism, but then nothing else will either; both preservation and simple replacement are off the table. The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all."

one of the things up for grabs in the current news environment is the nature of authority. In particular, I noted that people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia (in its ‘breaking news’ mode.). Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.”

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.

We were talking about authority and trust the other day in class after Angela's presentation on medical diagnoses - here's a new post from Clay Shirky on the topic - worth reading.

Invité à réagir à l'évolution des médias, Clay Shirky explique que la transformation majeure dans l'environnement de l'information repose sur la nature de l'autorité. En quelques années, par l'intermédiaire de nouveaux outils de filtrage et d'agrégation, nos autorités ont changé. Et de définir l'autorité algorithmique nouvelle par trois caractéristiques : il utilise des sources multiples et les combine pour les classer ; ces résultats étant suffisamment bons, les gens lui font confiance ; enfin, les gens se rendent compte que nombreux sont ceux qui font confiance à ces résultats ce qui les aide à adopter ces nouvelles autorités (comme Wikipédia).

Gina Trapani/Lifehacker, Sept. 22, 2008.

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

"When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t."

Charlie Bit My Finger

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

The Ted Conferences have always provided interesting and though provoking content. This is a great view on the impact of video with social networking... listen up... Barack Obama did... and won an election without a lot of substance, but with a lot of social networking connections and digital media.

Evolution of media: 1. The printing press and moveable type 2. Wireless and telephone 3. Recorded image and sound (photographs then audio) 4. Harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air (Radio and television) Up until then we had an asymmetry of media - the media that's great at creating groups is no good at creating conversations and the media that's great at creating conversations is no good at creating groups. Then came… 5. The internet! Key qualities… • Media as site of coordination • Consumers to producers • Global, social, ubiquitous and cheap • Convene people, not control them

"convene, don't control" audience

Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.

TED Talks Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world - Clay Shirky http://bit.ly/aJTIY2 /cc @feedly

"Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world."

collaboration

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world | Video on TED.com http://goo.gl/ZIgA