Internet curmudgeon Nick Carr attacked this particular question in a recent post on his blog, and got into an interesting debate with digital-media theorist Clay Shirky via the comments. Ironically, while Shirky is often criticized as a purveyor of wishful thinking about media, it is Carr who argues there is something ineffable and mysterious about the format we know as the book, while Shirky’s argument seems more based in reality

(Note: we are going to be discussing the future of the book and potential business models for book-related content at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 18, with a panel discussion featuring Atavist founder Evan Ratliff and Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks).

In his original essay — entitled “Will Gutenberg laugh last?” — Carr notes that research shows e-book reading is still on the rise, but also shows that print reading continues to command a large share of the market, and that printed book sales are “holding up relatively well.” Some publishers and distributors have even noticed a slowdown in e-book sales, says Carr, who then goes on to propose some reasons why that might be the case, including:

“We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)… the e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been.”

Shirky says even e-books themselves are transitional

Among those who showed up to comment on Carr’s piece was Shirky, who argues that it is more likely the book format itself is simply going to die out as a result of the web and other developments — and not just the printed book, but the whole concept of a book, which he describes as nothing more than a “production unit” for content, like the album was for music.

As Shirky puts it:

“Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.”

In a comment of his own, Carr responds that whatever might happen to reference works like encyclopedias or phone books — which he agrees would make more sense in digital form — books that consist of an “extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice” would always remain, even if it is in digital form, because there is more to it than just being a convenient container for content.

“Your desire to see cultural artifacts as mere technological artifacts, as “production units,” leads you to jump to the conclusion that because the narrative art of the book is resistant to digital re-formation, the narrative art is doomed to obsolescence.”

In a follow-up comment, Shirky maintains that the novel — fictional or not — is a content model that is “pretty decisively wrapped up in the affordances and limitations of print,” from their length to the idea that all of the content has to be delivered at the same time and for a single price. He argues that given the “native grain of the internet,” those features would not be transferrable to an online environment in the long term. In other words, e-books themselves might be just an interim step towards something else.

“If I’m right about this, the fate of the printed book will have less to do with competition from ebooks (at least in their ‘digital copy of print’ versions) than from competition with Longreads and New Inquiry for the time and attention of the reader of extended narratives.”

Will books follow the epic poem into oblivion?

This doesn’t sit well with Carr, however, who responds with a comment that (among other things) accuses Shirky of having an almost nihilistic approach to cultural artefacts like books, and of failing to see that in some cases having a new product or platform replace an old one might be a loss for humanity rather than a gain:

“I’m certainly not suggesting that uniquely valuable forms of media, or the modes of thinking or expression that they promote, are immune to destruction or alteration by historical forces, particularly ones driven by utilitarian concerns. But if such a medium is lost or diminished by technological or economic change, we shouldn’t simply say ‘who cares; other shit will come along.’”

In a response to an email from Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly on the subject, Carr gives some examples of valuable forms of media that he believes have been lost or diminished: namely, “the oral epic poem, the symphony, the silent film with live musician accompaniment, the dramatic play, the short-form cartoon, the map [and] the LP.” And he argues that the book, the movie and the video game could also fall into this category.

In the end, Carr’s argument comes down to a belief that old forms of expression like the traditional book are better than anything that might have come along to displace them from their position of dominance in our culture — and his belief forms part of the argument in his book The Shallows, which argues that digital media is actually changing the way we think, and in general making us more stupid (a view I have argued against).

Are we seeing the rise of new artistic forms that will be as beneficial to humanity as the epic poem was, or the symphony, or the silent film? I think we are, and Clay Shirky seems to as well, but Carr clearly disagrees. Who is right won’t be known for some time, if ever.

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The authors of the Tow report are well known to anyone who pays attention to the future of journalism: Clay Shirky is a journalism professor and author of books like “Here Comes Everybody,” C.W. Anderson is an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island and a frequent commentator on media and cultural theory, and Emily Bell is the former head of digital at The Guardian newspaper and now director of the Tow Center. The paper — which Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab has done a nice summary of — is a combination of analysis of the current situation, philosophical statements about the nature of the problems facing the industry, and recommendations for how to adapt.

“[This paper] is not, however, about ‘the future of the news industry,’ both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry any more. There used to be one, held together by the usual things that hold an industry together: similarity of methods among a relatively small and coherent group of businesses, and an inability for anyone outside that group to produce a competitive product. Those conditions no longer hold true.”

Things will probably get worse before they get better

As the paper notes, if you wanted to sum up the past decade in the news business, you might do so with a single phrase: “Everyone suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models.” But this has not been a panacea for journalism — in fact, as Shirky has said before, things are likely to get a lot worse before they start getting better, and there’s no guarantee of the latter:

“The effect of the current changes in the news ecosystem has already been a reduction in the quality of news in the United States. On present evidence, we are convinced that journalism in this country will get worse before it gets better, and, in some places (principally mid-size and small cities with no daily paper) it will get markedly worse.”

Instead of some magic wand for returning the industry to its glory days, the paper says it wants to help “limit the scope, depth and duration of that decay by pointing to ways to create useful journalism using tools, techniques and assumptions that weren’t even possible 10 years ago.” Among other things, the report stresses the need to embrace techniques such as crowdsourcing — since the people formerly known as the audience (to use journalism professor Jay Rosen’s phrase) are often better able to provide real-time information about certain events, such as the Arab Spring revolutions or Hurricane Sandy — as well as structured data and algorithms.

The Tow paper also discusses a number of alternative models for journalism, including the non-profit approach taken by outlets such as ProPublica, and the “artisanal” approach of startups such as Homicide Watch — the real-time, data-driven site founded by a husband-and-wife team — and former startups that have become businesses such as Talking Points Memo. And it makes a number of recommendations for what existing organizations (and journalists) can do to take advantage of the changes occurring around them, including the need to form partnerships with startups and alternative sources.

There is no way to put Humpty Dumpty together again

There are a couple of significant barriers to this happening, however, and the main ones are the inflexibility and reluctance to change that exists in both media institutions and individual journalists — something that others such as media economist Robert Picard have also mentioned:

“Traditional news organizations have tended to conserve both working methods and hierarchy, even as the old business models are collapsing, and even when new opportunities do not fit in those old patterns… Adapting to a world where the people formerly known as the audience are not readers and viewers but users and publishers will mean changing not just tactics but also self-conception. Merely bolting on a few new techniques will not be enough to adapt to the changing ecosystem.”

According to the authors, the important things for media institutions to realize are that “First, there is no way to preserve or restore the shape of journalism as it has been practiced for the past 50 years, and second, it is imperative that we collectively find new ways to do the kind of journalism needed to keep the United States from sliding into casual self-dealing and venality.” While some are hoping that paywalls and other forms of reader subscription will make up for the rapid — and continuing — decline in advertising revenue, the Tow report says that this is not likely to be the case:

There has been some good news in the form of direct reader fees for digital properties, using the ‘payment after a page-view threshold’ model. These fees are obviously welcome; however, few large publications implementing them have managed to get to even 5 percent adoption by their web users, and the page threshold virtually guarantees that most such users will never be asked to pay. As a result, though the new income serves to slow the reduction of revenue, it does not stop it, much less reverse it.

A smaller, more flexible, more networked future

So what does a future of “post-industrial journalism” look like? According to the Tow Center paper, it contains a much smaller number of traditional outlets — many of which will also have become smaller in order to contain their costs — and a growing number of non-traditional providers, some of which may work hand-in-hand with mainstream sources. Getting to this future, the authors say, will mean “rethinking every organizational aspect of news production, increased openness to partnerships, increased reliance on publicly available data and increased use of individuals, crowds and machines to produce raw material.”

In this future, the journalist “has not been replaced but displaced” — forced to move higher up the editorial food-chain to a role that filters, interprets and makes sense of the information coming from social streams, individuals, crowds and data. Unfortunately, the authors argue that “too many reporters remain locked into a mindset where a relatively limited list of sources is still relied on to gather evidence for most important stories, with the occasional rewritten press release or direct observation thrown in.” For them, the future is fairly bleak.

What is required, the authors argue, is a form of journalism that works “between the crowd and the algorithm,” and an ecosystem where the journalist serves “as an investigator, a translator, a storyteller.” Those who can develop or expand those skills will do well — and news outlets that re-orient themselves so that they can focus on that approach, in whatever sphere they decide to, will be the ones that prosper, whether they are new or traditional.

One of the problems with manifestos like the one the Tow report’s authors have written (in the interests of full disclosure, I know and admire all three of them) is that they wind up preaching to the converted and have little or no effect on those who need to hear their advice the most. Innovators like our own Om Malik or Josh Marshall or the founders of ProPublica and Homicide Watch know what the report’s authors are describing — they have lived it, and are living it. And the newspaper editors who need to hear it most will likely never read it, or ignore the most important parts.

That said, however, if anyone is looking for a handy guide to the future that we are already living in, this is as good as any. And if you work for a traditional media company, memorize its contents and then slip a copy into the pile of newspaper stories on your senior editor’s desk before you leave.

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After giving a kind of whirlwind tour of the open-source movement in his talk, including the rise of Linux, Shirky devoted much of his discussion to Github — a kind of crowdsourced platform for maintaining code that Linux creator Linus Torvalds also created, which allows anyone to edit, to “fork” or create their own version, and to track the changes that others make. It’s not a big stretch to get from that idea to the idea of crowdsourcing legislation, which is what Shirky seems to have in mind, and there have already been some attempts at doing this via Github: for example, a German software developer has uploaded all of Germany’s laws to the platform so that citizens can recommend and track changes.

It’s an intriguing idea: that a simple software platform aimed at collaboration could change the way legislation is developed and implemented, much like the process that powers Wikipedia has created a crowdsourced encyclopedia that evolves and changes over time. But is it realistic? There were plenty of skeptics who said Wikipedia would never succeed, and yet it has an excellent track record when it comes to reliability, despite some hiccups in the process, such as the recent incident involving author Philip Roth. That said, however, there are also plenty of critics who believe that the “cabal” of editors who control the crowd-powered encyclopedia have too much authority.

Of course, some would argue that we’re already in that kind of situation with most governments anyway, and therefore Github couldn’t make things any worse. And Shirky is not the only one to make this argument: developer Abe Voelker has proposed a “Github for laws” that would take exactly the same approach to crafting and crowdsourcing legislation. There have also been some initial experiments with similar ideas — including Iceland’s new constitution and similar types of project in Finland and Ireland — which shows that others are also open to the concept.

One of the problems with applying a technical solution like Github to a massive cultural and political process like government, however, is that creating laws — even small ones — is very different from changing a piece of code so that Linux can duplicate Windows-style typefaces, or changing the Wikipedia entry on George Bush. And if even those kinds of prosaic examples can lead to the equivalent of a Linux or Wikipedia holy war, which in many cases they have, what hope do we have that politicians can actually use a similar process to change the way that government works? As Shirky suggests in his talk, there’s also a pretty entrenched bureaucracy that has become part of most governments and likely has no interest in relinquishing that control to the crowd.

In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Shirky described the potentially massive impact of crowdsourcing and crowd-powered social change, and his admiration of Github seems to be part of an attempt to find tools that will help us deal with the tidal wave of human-driven collaboration. This is something we clearly need, so it’s worthwhile to start looking at solutions — and while Github may not be the answer, at this point just about anything is probably worth a shot.

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The fact that print is declining as a medium for journalism, and that newspapers are going to have to deal with that in a variety of ways, was brought home with a thud recently when Advance Publications and Postmedia announced they would no longer print some of their papers on certain days, in order to save money. In the case of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the loss of the printed version of the paper three days a week has been criticized as almost a dereliction of public duty by the paper’s owner — as though something digital doesn’t have as much force as the printed version. As more newspapers are forced to make similar decisions, what impact will that have on their ability to serve a public purpose as an information source about the community?

New York Times writer David Carr was one of the first to make this connection explicit in his story on the Times-Picayune cuts — a piece that was almost a eulogy for the newspaper and its relationship with the city of New Orleans, and in particular the bonds that were forged during the disastrous floods of 2005 (when the paper published only an online version). After describing how David Simon, creator of the TV shows The Wire and Treme, was worried about the loss of the watchdog role that a daily newspaper plays in a city with political corruption, Carr said:

The constancy of a daily paper — in the rack at the convenience store on Frenchman Street or on the tables of the coffeehouse on Maple Street — is a reminder to a city that someone is out there watching… You have to wonder whether it will still have the same impact when it doesn’t land day after day on doorsteps all over the city.

Does being digital rob a newspaper of some of its power?

In a discussion with Carr and others on Twitter after his story appeared, I argued that there is no reason (theoretically at least) why a digital-only organization couldn’t be just as much of a watchdog, and serve the community as well or better than a printed newspaper. Carr noted that many New Orleans residents don’t have internet access, and I countered that many residents likely don’t subscribe to the newspaper either — but he maintained there is a value to papers that are handed around or read in coffee shops that the web can’t duplicate.

Some of this is tied to the brand that a newspaper has, and the established history of covering a community. What happens to that when it stops printing on certain days, or shuts down altogether? One thing that can happen — especially if cost cutting extends to staff who would have done investigative or enterprise stories — is that a paper can lose a lot of goodwill, which is difficult to regain. But it raises the question: what is the purpose of a newspaper, to make money or to serve a public purpose in society? And can a digital paper do both?

Advance Publications, owned by the Newhouse family, shut down the printed newspaper in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2009 and went with a digital-only version — and according to some, it has lost a lot of the strength it used to have as a community voice. Charles Eisendrath of the University of Michigan told the New York Times that he eventually stopped subscribing to the website. “Is AnnArbor.com discussed much in Ann Arbor? No. Is it an authority? No,” he said. That kind of decline for a brand is likely to translate into a loss of advertising as well, which then becomes a slippery slope of cuts leading to more cuts.

Online can’t be seen as just a cost-cutting move

Warren Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway billionaire who just snapped up 63 newspapers from Media General for $142 million — and who has expressed publicly his commitment to the kind of local journalism that community dailies engage in — said in a recent interview that he wasn’t a fan of only printing on certain days, because he believes that might break some of the bond that consumers have with their newspapers (although Clay Shirky predicts Buffett himself will likely have to do the same thing soon). As Buffett put it to Howard Kurtz:

This three-day-a-week stuff really kills you. You want people who look at you every day…Once people get used to online, I don’t think they come back.

That’s the problem in a nutshell: once your newspaper has been stripped of the magic of print — the same magic that makes you far more appealing to advertisers than the amount of time spent with your medium would seem to indicate — you become just another digital voice among thousands or even millions of other voices. Then you are no different from the Huffington Post, or Buzzfeed, or a Twitter-driven news source such as News.me or Prismatic. In fact, you could actually be seen as worse in some ways, because you are a single voice.

What is the solution to this problem? If, as newspaper consultant and digital-media veteran Dan Conover said recently, newspapers have to confront the problem of costs head-on — and stop printing if that is the only avenue that will work — then they must make both the print experience and the digital-only version as unique as possible, and focus on the elements that make those two different mediums powerful in their own right. Simply hoping that everyone will implement paywalls and return the information age to the days of print-based scarcity, as David Simon seems to be recommending, is not a long-term solution.

The biggest issue for publishers like Advance is that doing this properly costs money, and if cost-cutting is their primary goal then investing in digital journalism may not seem like something worth doing. But the media companies that don’t do so will become just another voice in the crowd — and possibly not a very important one.

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There’s been a lot of attention focused on Berkshire Hathaway billionaire Warren Buffett’s recent $142-million purchase of Media General and its 63 newspapers — and that’s not at all surprising, since he seems to be the only one interested in buying newspapers rather than selling or closing them. But is his acquisition a brilliant financial gamble, or an indication of his faith in the long-term prospects of printed community newspapers? Media theorist and author Clay Shirky argues that it is neither: in fact, he says, Buffett misunderstands some fundamental things about the business he is buying into, and is therefore taking on a much bigger challenge than he probably realizes.

In a memo to the staffers at Media General’s newspapers after the deal was announced, Buffett — who also owns his home-town newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, and the Buffalo News — said that he has always loved newspapers, in part because his father and mother met while working at the Daily Nebraskan in 1924, and because he used to deliver them. And he reinforced to the troops his commitment to the future of local journalism, and his view that newspapers like the ones he bought have a bright future. As he put it:

Though the economics of the business have drastically changed since our purchase of The Buffalo News, I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future. It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town.

Hometown boosterism isn’t enough

But as Shirky notes in his criticism of Buffett’s move, cheering on the local news coverage of his community newspapers doesn’t really have anything to do with the fundamental business issues that confront those publications in a digital age. This advice from the billionaire, Shirky says “has no more content than a halftime cheer,” because if all it took to run a profitable newspaper was good local news coverage, then newspapers like the Media General chain and plenty of others wouldn’t be in the kind of trouble they are to begin with.

And Media General’s stable of papers are clearly in trouble: according to the former CEO, publishing revenues at the media company have fallen by more than 50 percent over the past five years, but the costs of printing and distribution have remained the same. That same kind of math has driven newspaper owners such as Advance Publications and Canada’s Postmedia Network to stop printing some of their newspapers on specific days of the week, as well as instituting layoffs and erecting paywalls in an attempt to bolster revenue.

Buffett’s letter makes it sound as though managing the relationship between reader and newspaper is the most important thing, Shirky says, but this is not the case:

Reading the letter, you’d never know that papers make most of their money from companies, not citizens, and have done for the better part of two centuries. It is disruptive competition for ad dollars, not changing reader engagement, that has sent the industry into a tailspin.

Shirky isn’t the first one to argue that Buffett doesn’t understand what it happening to newspapers: I tried to make a similar argument recently after the octogenarian investor made some comments about the virtues of paywalls (which I expect he is planning to implement at some or all of his new papers). Buffett said that the problems newspapers were facing were in part a result of “giving away their product at the same time they are selling it” — in other words, the decision not to charge for online news.

But as Shirky and I have both pointed out, this misunderstands the business newspapers are in. The reality is that newspapers have never sold the news to readers — readers pay for the distribution platform on which that news is printed, i.e. the paper itself and the packaging involved. And the subscription price of a newspaper and circulation revenues in general have historically only accounted for a small proportion of a media company’s overall revenue. In most cases, the bulk of that revenue comes from advertising.

Newspaper consumers have never paid for the news

The real business of a newspaper has been to aggregate content — news, but also comics and horoscopes and classifieds and lifestyle tips — as a way of capturing the attention of readers, and then sell that attention to advertisers. And the problem for newspapers, both hyper-local and national, is that advertisers are no longer as interested in that arrangement as they used to be. Much of the attention that they seek to monetize has gone elsewhere, to websites and services like Facebook — especially the attention of younger readers with disposable income.

It could be that Buffett sees the future of local newspapers as one in which readers cannot access anything without paying for it, and hopes that the strength of connection those papers have with their communities will convince large numbers of people to sign up for a paywall — thereby turning each paper into a tiny version of The Economist or the Wall Street Journal. But without some kind of turnaround in both print and digital newspaper advertising, those businesses are likely to be much, much smaller than they are now.

Shirky’s prognosis is fairly grim. He says Buffett is just a short trip away from the same kind of decisions that Advance Publications has been forced to make:

A newspaper used to be both a profitable business and a public service, but this was just an accident of the competitive (or rather uncompetitive) media landscape. His commonsense approach to saving papers won’t work, because there is no longer any commonsense business model for a former monopoly that is still seeing its revenues erode faster than its costs.

Shirky notes that Buffett will still likely make money on his investment, since he bought the newspapers at fire-sale prices, and they have a number of valuable assets such as the real estate their offices sit on. And perhaps Buffett will surprise everyone and find a magic recipe for success, some combination of print/digital and paywall/advertising that will ensure his papers will remain healthy or even grow. But his comments about the fundamental nature of the business he has acquired shouldn’t fill anyone with confidence.

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Google has a somewhat tense relationship with the traditional newspaper industry, since publishers like News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch still believe it is depriving them of revenue by “stealing” their content and aggregating it at Google News. So you might think that Google’s head of news products, Richard Gingras, would try to smooth over any ruffled feathers when talking about the future of news. He did the opposite in a recent talk at Harvard, however — comparing newspapers to old-fashioned internet portals like Yahoo, and suggesting that unless media companies can adapt to the Web rather than fighting it, they are likely doomed.

We weren’t at the Gingras event, which was hosted by the Nieman Foundation, but Matt Stempeck of MIT’s Center for Civic Media was there, and he live-blogged the entire thing on the Center’s website (his original notes are posted here). Although these are not direct quotes, we’ve taken the liberty of highlighting some of the comments that Gingras made on a number of important topics, from the tradeoff inherent in paywalls to the distraction of iPad apps and the dangers of innovating too slowly.

On how newspapers got to where they are:

We look back at the 40 golden years of newspaper profitability as if things had been structured that way forever. But these four decades were triggered by an earlier media disruption: television. The rise of television advertising caused a contraction in the newspaper business, where major metropolitan markets went from supporting 4-5 newspapers to 1-2 papers. The limited number of remaining companies allowed monopolitistic pricing. This wealth was created by disruption, and what disruption gives, it taketh away.

Gingras says that the previous dominance that newspapers enjoyed was due primarily to geography, and to some degree demographic targeting. Now, thanks to the Web, he says we are seeing “a disaggregation of content flows as well as advertising.” Like media theorist Clay Shirky, the Google executive argues that one of the big problems for newspapers is that they always depended on “cross-subsidization” of topics — so the classified ads and the lifestyle section paid for the foreign reporting. Now, he says “we have blogs focusing on these niches alone, with a much keener sense of commercialization.”

On whether journalism is better or worse:

The pace of technological change will not abate, and to think of our current time as a transition between two eras, rather than a continuum of change, is a mistake. There has been tremendous disruption in journalism, but there are upsides: everyone has a printing press, there are no gatekeepers [or at least new gatekeepers], and journalism can and will be better than in the past.

On the iPad as the savior of journalism:

[The iPad is] a fatal distraction for media companies. Too many publishers looked at the tablet as the road home to their magazine format, subscription model, and expensive full-page ads. The format of a single device does not change the fundamental ecosystem underneath it, and this shiny tablet has taken media companies’ eyes off of the ball.

Jason Pontin, publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, made a similar point in a recent post in which he described how unsatisfying the magazine’s apps were, and how he is giving up the “walled garden” approach and moving towards a Web-native model.

On how newspapers are like the old Web portals:

Gingras doesn’t believe the vertical model of a newspaper makes sense going forward. He compares the metropolitan newspapers’ all-things to all-people product to content portals for specific communities. This strategy doesn’t make sense given the possibilities. Yahoo!’s initial success was as a portal. But portals have disappeared online as consumers have learned to navigate the web on their own and found the niche sites they love.

On whether paywalls are the answer:

Some publishers say, “They bought it before, they’ll buy it again,” or “We need to get people back into the habit of paying for news.” But consumers never did pay the true costs. The Wall Street Journal pulls their paywall off because it publishes information that is perceived to have high value and is written for business audiences, whose subscriptions are paid for by their employers. News companies must disambiguate their content and business models and devolve from the generalist approach, which is hemmoraging both readers and revenue.

The whole interview is worth reading, because Gingras doesn’t just criticize newspapers and other traditional media for being old and slow — he has some concrete tips for how they can benefit from the disruption the Web has caused, including a suggestion that newspapers consider building on a single story or topic page, Wikipedia-style, instead of just publishing story after story on a subject with different URLs and different information (he provided some other thoughts at a recent Google-sponsored journalism event).

For Gingras, the bottom line is that if newspapers can’t adapt to changing market conditions and business models, they will become classic victims of author Clay Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma.” As he put it:

When the net blossomed in the 90′s, why didn’t newspapers respond? Because classified ads were a cash-cow and CEOs were responsible to Wall Street, so few had the courage to see Craigslist as a threat and blow up their cash-cow. And that is the Innovator’s Dilemma. The giants won’t eat their young. The Ben Huh’s have the advantage of a very fresh slate.

Note: We’ll be discussing these kinds of media issues and more at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in New York City. Register today.

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We’ve written a lot at GigaOM about the rise of newspaper paywalls, a trend that seems to be accelerating as the financial health of the industry continues to deteriorate, and in particular I’ve written a number of posts about what I see as the downsides of paywalls. But the announcement this week that a paywall is coming to Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail — where I spent a large chunk of my career as a journalist — made me stop and think about my opposition to them in a more personal way than I have in a while.

Do I think that all paywalls or subscription plans are wrong? No. In fact, I am in favor of newspapers charging for access to specific kinds of value-added content or services. But when it comes to broad, general-interest paywalls around all of a newspaper’s content, I’m not in favor of them for a number of reasons.

The first reason is personal, and it’s connected directly to my experiences at the Globe, where I worked from 1994 to 2010 — because a paywall that the Globe erected in 2004 led directly to me becoming a blogger. Like the New York Times, which had a subscription plan called Times Select that lasted from 2005 until 2007, the Globe had a paywall around some of its content for several years before it was finally removed in 2008.

Paywalls restrict the flow of content, and that’s bad

I was a business columnist when the wall went up, and afterwards I started noticing that the number of visitors to my column had fallen dramatically. In fact, on average it looked like I was getting about 90 percent fewer readers than I had been before — almost exactly the same dropoff that the Times of London would see years later, when News Corp. instituted a paywall there. And as much as I wanted the Globe to make money so that it could continue to pay my salary, I didn’t like that at all.

As a writer, the thing I am most interested in is reaching as many people as possible with my writing, regardless of whether they pay for it directly or not. That’s one reason why I was so attracted to the Internet when I first discovered it, and to technologies like RSS. So I started a blog — partly as an experiment, but also as a way around the paywall, since columns were behind the wall but blogs were not (partly because no one really knew what a blog was at that point). Needless to say, I got addicted to the format.

Do I want my former colleagues at the Globe to lose their jobs? Of course not. I’d like to see the paper remain healthy and successful, but I don’t think paywalls are the answer — and I think focusing on them too much can distract a newspaper from doing the other things that are necessary to survive. And that leads me to reasons #2 and #3.

Paywalls are backward-looking, not forward-looking

The second reason I don’t like paywalls is that I think they are a step backward rather than a step forward — a “line of sandbags,” so to speak. Whether or not the newspapers that implement them are willing to admit it, one of the primary features of a paywall is that it keeps people in, not out. In other words, it makes it less likely that they will quit the paper and go digital completely, and thereby protects the printed newspaper.

That may be a smart move in order to stem the decline in ad revenue, but it isn’t even remotely forward-looking or adaptive. In other words, it does nothing to help a paper adapt to the web and to changing market conditions. As Clay Shirky has pointed out, the reality for newspapers is that the service they used to provide — in which they aggregated content from across a broad range of topics — isn’t really cutting it any more, when anyone can become an aggregator and advertisers are looking for more targeted audiences.

To me, it makes more sense to try and figure out how to take advantage of the Web in order to provide something that the current market is likely to value, instead of focusing on how to squeeze as much as possible out of a declining market. What is The Huffington Post doing right, or Buzzfeed, or Politico, or The Atlantic? Why don’t they need paywalls? Coming up with creative answers to those questions is likely to play a much larger role in the survival of traditional media entities than a paywall.

Maybe it’s trying a number of small things, as Ken Doctor wrote recently — like e-books drawn from the archives, or live events that cater to a specific crowd, or partnerships with online retailers for affiliate sales. Or maybe it’s the kind of “reverse paywall” that Jeff Jarvis and former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti have talked about, where members get perks based on their interaction with a paper, rather than getting penalized for their loyalty by having to pay. In other words, a velvet rope instead of a wall.

Newspapers need to adapt, not retrench

The third reason I don’t like paywalls is that I don’t think they are going to work — and by “work,” I mean solve the problems that most newspapers are facing. Everyone seems to have decided the New York Times paywall is a success because it has about 400,000 subscribers and it is bringing in an estimated $35 million in revenue. But that is still a drop in the bucket: according to the paper’s recent results, one of the world’s most successful paywalls is not even making up for the continuing decline in print ad revenue.

And even if the New York Times can cut costs dramatically or boost its online ad revenue to fill that gap, what happens to other newspapers? Not everyone is going to be able to convince hundreds of thousands of readers to pay for their content. What happens to medium-sized or regional newspapers that don’t have the same brand name, or the ability to produce as much unique content as the Times or the Wall Street Journal? A paywall is just as likely to kill them off completely as to save them.

Are newspapers going to lay off staff and cut costs until they can manage to survive on subscription fees alone? If so, then they will effectively become small, controlled-circulation newsletters, catering to a tiny constituency. What about the broader ambitions that newspapers were supposed to have, about being a voice for truth, upholding the public interest? What happens to that mission with a paywall?

As web developer Stijn Debrouwere pointed out recently in an insightful post, newspapers are no longer just competing with other newspapers, or even with other traditional media — they are competing with things that don’t even look like journalism. In effect, they are competing with the entire internet. Is it better to try and adapt and meet that competition head-on, or to retreat behind a wall of sandbags and try to compel the waves to stop rising, King Canute-style? My vote is on the former.

Note: We’ll be discussing these kinds of media issues and more at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in New York City. Register today.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Giuseppe Bognanni, Brian Snelson and jphilipg

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As he has shown with books like “Here Comes Everybody” and his ideas about how the “cognitive surplus” has created a crowdsourcing explosion, Clay Shirky has a way of putting his finger on trends in media — disruptions that we are all experiencing, but sometimes fail to properly appreciate. In a recent interview, he described one of those trends when it comes to publishing: namely, the fact that publishing itself is no longer a job, “it’s a button.” By that he means that the sheer act of publishing something is so simple now that it doesn’t even qualify as a job or a task that requires an entire industry. So what are publishers supposed to do now?

Shirky’s interview was with Findings — a website and service that aims to make reading more social by allowing users to share passages they have highlighted in books — as part of a series called “How We Will Read,” which has also featured authors like Clive Thompson and Steven Johnson. When Shirky is asked how publishing is changing, he says that it isn’t changing at all, it is “going away”:

[T]he word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done… We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.

Obviously, Shirky is being a bit disingenuous. Publishing things — especially something like a book, or a magazine, or even a newspaper — takes a little bit more than just a blog platform. But his point is the same as the one Om made in a post about what he called the “democratization of distribution” that social media and other web tools have created: namely, that publishing is now something anyone can do. You no longer have to be part of a priesthood or guild of professionals, whether it’s the book-publishing industry or the traditional newspaper business, in order to create content that can (theoretically at least) reach tens of thousands or even millions of people.

How do traditional publishers add value?

We’ve seen this with self-published authors like Amanda Hocking, who used Amazon’s Kindle platform to make more than $2-million in revenue for her books without the help of the traditional publishing industry, or John Locke, who has sold over a million copies of his self-published books. We’ve seen it in the news-publishing business as well, where web-only entities like The Huffington Post and Politico have created substantial media properties without the help of the traditional news industry — and in video, where videographers like Tim Pool and others have become one-man TV news stations.

And what are publishers to do amidst this kind of disruption? As Shirky points out in his interview, they need to think about what other kinds of value they can add, apart from the simple act of owning a platform (like a newspaper) or the distribution system for a specific kind of content (like the traditional book-publishing industry). That control — and the ability to manufacture demand or create information scarcity that came along with it — is effectively gone forever. Says Shirky:

The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet.

So an author might not need a publisher in order to reach his or her readers, since the Kindle and other methods provide all the access they could want, but they might see the value in having a personal relationship with an editor who can help them shape their content: when Hocking shocked some observers by signing a $2-million deal with a traditional publishing house, for example, she mentioned professional editing and support as one of the reasons for her decision. And Andy Carvin of NPR has shown how valuable fact-checking can be when applied to social media as a journalistic source.

In the end, Shirky is making the same point we have made before when it comes to publishing: if traditional publishers — of all kinds, not just the book industry — want to maintain some of the value they have had in the past, they will have to stop thinking about controlling the process of distribution or the delivery platform, and think more about the services they can add for authors and readers. If you’re interested in the future of media and publishing, be sure to join us at paidContent 2012 on May 23 in New York City.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Willi Heidelbach and Jeremy Mates

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Thanks to the rise self-publishing tools, from Amazon’s Kindle platform to Apple’s iAuthor software, anyone who wants to write a book can do so and theoretically reach an audience of millions — as self-publishing superstars such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke have shown. But this explosion of amateur authors and publishers also means a lot more competition for an audience. So how do writers make money? First of all, according to author and marketer Seth Godin, they have to give up the idea that they somehow deserve to be paid for their writing.

In a recent interview with Digital Book World, the writer and creator of the Domino Project — a joint publishing venture with Amazon that he recently wound up — was asked about his advice that authors should give their books away for free and that they should worry more about spreading their message and building a fan base instead of focusing on how to monetize it right away. And how would he respond to writers concerned about their ability to make a living from their writing? Godin’s response:

Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word — over.

The rise of the amateur has disrupted all forms of content

This probably isn’t the kind of message that most authors (or creative professionals of any kind) want to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The rise of the amateur, powered by the democratization of distribution provided by the Web and social media, is something that is disrupting virtually every form of content that can be converted into bits. To take just two examples, the news industry is struggling to adapt to an era where anyone can commit “random acts of journalism” with a blog or smartphone — and where sources of news have the ability to publish their own content instead of having to go through a middleman — and photography has been battling the rise of the amateur for years now.

The crucial principle at work in all of these areas is the idea that your real competition isn’t the book or news outlet that is better than you; it’s the one that is good enough for a majority of your audience. So maybe the Huffington Post version of that news story isn’t as good as the one in the New York Times, but it is good enough for many readers. And maybe those vampire books by Amanda Hocking or the detective novels from million-selling author John Locke aren’t as good as yours, but for hundreds of thousands of weekend readers they are probably good enough. Godin’s point isn’t that you can’t make money; it’s that you have to think differently about how to accomplish that task.

If you’re a mystery writer, can you find 1000 true fans to pay a hundred dollars a year each to get an ongoing serial from you? It’s not the market’s job to tell authors how to monetize their work. The market doesn’t care. If there’s no scarcity of what they want, it’s hard to get them to pay for it.

Who says that artists have a right to make money?

Film director Francis Ford Coppola said something similar in a recent interview, in which he discussed some of the lessons he had learned over decades of practicing his craft. He also talked about how the Internet — and specifically the widespread downloading of music and movies — has changed the nature of the business. Somewhat surprisingly for someone who has been involved in creating some of Hollywood’s biggest commercial successes, Coppola said that he sympathized more with those doing the downloading than he did with the content creators whose work was being affected:

As we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

As media theorist Clay Shirky has pointed out before, abundance breaks a lot of content-related business models that were built on scarcity, and that includes the ones that have supported the book-publishing industry for so long. That’s why publishers have been scrambling to try to lock down their content — including jacking up the prices that libraries pay for e-books — and it’s why authors who have a built-in audience are using the Web to connect directly with that audience. Godin’s message may not be a popular one, but it is the way that content works now.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Joel Bombardier and Mike Licht

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