Avoiding risk is a risk we can no longer afford.
If you find yourself debating a new approach to news, consider the similar conclusions of two very different reports.
In a post to his blog on Friday night, NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky argues that the best hope for journalism’s future lies in aggressive experimentation. Excerpts:
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears… Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points…
When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society,’ the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work…
Today, the Project for Excellence in Journalism releases the latest of its exhaustive annual analyses of the State of the News Media. Rick Edmonds, co-author of the study’s newspaper chapter, notes in the Biz Blog that PEJ “is cautious on prescriptives.”
But PEJ highlights several ideas it believes hold more promise than, for example, micropayments or nonprofit ownership:
- A cable model that includes payment to content providers attached to monthly fees collected by Internet Service Providers
- Online retail malls enabling local search networks
- Subscription-based niche products for professional audiences
Among the most notable of PEJ’s more than 200,000 words:
Neither report suggests experimentation without purpose. Both make a persuasive case that the future of news will be served — not threatened — by the kind of risk-taking we have barely enough time to try.
