Clay Shirky's views on the future of media
are uncritically reported in The Grauniad today:
On Newspapers:
The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about."
Unfortunately, the things these major populist Online Newspapers are demonstrably bad at is investigative reporting on hard stuff that advertisers don't want to touch. In addition the (high value audience) economics of the Economist et al will allow high quality reportage (and printing) for quite a while longer than the mass rags as it has mo' subscriptions. What the New Media Romantics seem not to want to admit (publicly anyway) is a possible emergence emergence of
a two tier news market, with Fluff for Free and real news for subscribers only.
On TV:
The renaissance of quality television is an indicator of what an increased number of distribution channels can do. It is no accident that this started with cable.
It started with Cable
in the US because cable users paid subscriptions and real cash allowed - nay demanded - a move upmarket to more valuable users, whereas Ad funding in the US drove an inexorable downward shift to lowest common denominator programming. In countries like the UK this renaissance never occurred because there never was a collapse in the first place - the BBC ensured a minimum standard was kept.
But this comment is the one that made me write this post:
And the BBC iPlayer? That's a debacle. The digital rights management thing ...let's just pretend that it was a dream like on Dallas and start from scratch. The iPlayer is a back-to-the-future business model. It's a total subversion of Reithian values in favour of trying to create what had been an accidental monopoly as a kind of robust business model. The idea that the old geographical segmenting of terrestrial broadcasts is recreatable is a fantasy and a waste of time.
This is the same iPlayer (that is seeing its usage jump) being panned by the same Cool School Cult thinking that panned Hulu until it too succeeded. Simply put, Clay is off-beam with the emerging video reality here - we have just finished a major piece of analysis of the Future of Online Video, and it is clear that the value of the Here Comes Everybody sort of User Generated video media will be very small compared to high quality, long form content.
(ie in Online Video the Hulu / iPlayer models are demonstrably working, but many of the New School theses are demonstrably not in the short term, and we contend that with the freeze of speculative venture funding that they are less likely to succeed in the medium term as well going forward))
Clay has written some brilliant stuff over the years, and I am a real fan of his work - but he is not always right, and I think he is far less comfortable on video than on newspaper issues. A nd if this piece of uncritical reportage is the future of the Grauniad's reporting on New Media, well they deserve to be taken out by the Huffington Post because they are adding no value here.
