Social Justice Shorts: News About the News

NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE

I realize I often put up multiple posts that are labeled MUST READ. But for any of you involved in the future-of-journalism discussion, this essay by Clay Shirky is a no-kidding, you-really-have-to-read-this item:

NYU Professor and new media go-to thinker, Clay Shirky, has written an what is essentially a brilliant think piece about what is, and is not, and will never again be…. happening in the newspaper business.

As you’ll see, I’ve got a sample clip below, but this is not really an essay one can easily sample. Shirky has a first rate mind and his musings and prognostications about communications and the media are nearly always shatteringly good.

This one, which is flying around the web at a rapid rate, is essential.

….Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad.

[SNIP]

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse…..

Then once you’ve read Shirky’s piece, read this from the Washington Post and….lets just say, the latter kinda illustrates the former.

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PELOSI TO DOJ: WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING ANTITRUST REGS

Worried about the fate of the SF Chronicle, and other financially drowning newspapers, on Monday Nancy Pelosi made a pitch to the U.S. Justice Department to drop antitrust regulations for media mergers that might save papers such as the Chron.

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PROFILING THE LAST DAY OF THE SEATTLE P-I

The Seattle pub, The Stranger, did a nice and humanistic job of covering the last day of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Seattle P-I will now be operating online only with a very, very trimmed down news staff of 20 people.

Here’s the publisher’s video announcement.

And in an upbeat, make-lemonade-type statement, Hearst Newspapers President Steven Swartz said the P-I “isn’t a newspaper online—it’s an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information Web site at its core.”

Okay. Well, we truly hope so.