Shirky, Journalism, the BBC and me

A very interesting talk by Clay Shirky is transcripted over at Nieman Journalism Lab, its all about the Future of Accountability Journalism. In essence, it argues that we have had decent investigative journalism for most of the 20th century accidentally, in that advertisers paid over the top owing to limited print inventory, which drove a cash surplus, and that allowed newspapermen to do what they really wanted, which was print fascinating stories from their Man in Havana or whatever. Advertisers who demurred were left in no doubt about the paucity of other options, and this also allowed newspapers to stay free of commercial pressures, and thus they were able to bite the hands that fed them.

This, of course, is no longer the case. The Newspapers have been dis-aggregated and the stuff people will pay for has been siphoned out (classifieds, fluff content etc) leaving newspapers with the expensive stuff (investigative journalists) but no-one willing to pay for it. And as Shirky notes, that despite the New Media Utopianists' plaudits, this is Not A Good Thing:

....I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists.

I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

He cites historical precedent, ie the hundred years following the printing press as a time of confusion, and thus hypothesizes there won't be a quick solution now either:

....that was a hundred years in which people almost literally did not know what to think. The old institutions were visibly not functioning any longer, but the nation-state as a new organizing principle was not yet in place. And those were, for many people, not a great hundred years.

So I have no idea how long this transition will take. But I don’t think that some degree of failure and decay is avoidable. I think our goal should be to minimize the depth of that trough, to constrain that trough to the areas we can constrain it to, and to hasten its end. But I don’t think we can get away with a simple and rapid alternative to what we enjoyed in the 20th century — in part because the accidents that held that landscape together in the 20th century were so crazily contingent.

His solution seems to be to recognise that nearly all the investigative journalism eggs are in the News Industry basket, and thats a systemic failure - eggs need to be distributed across multiple, smaller baskets in a Darwinian manner, and a thousand flowers should be left to bloom:

So we don’t need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you — we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. That’s the issue before us. There will not be anything that replaces newspapers, because if you could write the list of stuff you needed and organizational characteristics and it looked like newspapers, newspapers would be able to fill that role, right?

It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability.

Earlier on he makes an interesting point, ie the Internet has driven a shift away from pure commercial models, to other types of funding:

....there’s three methods for creating public goods. You go to the market, right? Not public goods, but rather things that are accessible to the public. You can go to the market, and things in the market are created when revenues can reliably exceed expenses. And then you expect some company to set itself up and provision.

You can have a public organization that has some source of income other than revenue, whether it is endowment, donations, taxes, whatever. It typically operates in different legal regime. Producing goods because they believe that that is the right use of that money and they are constituted to pursue those goals.

And then you can have social production where a group of people, just to get together and do something for themselves. Markets are how most cars are produced. Public goods are how much roads are produced. Social stuff is how most birthday parties are produced, how most picnics are produced, right? It has just not been a big feature of the landscape. But, now it is.

The positive supply-side shot to the cost of coordination represented by the Internet means that groups of people who are assembled in non-market and non-managerial modes of production

What the Internet does is it makes all commercial models of journalism harder to sustain — not impossible, but harder. And it makes public models easier to sustain — partly because of the lowered cost, partly because of the [inaudible]. And it makes social models much, much easier. So we’re seeing, I believe, a rebalancing of the landscape in terms of the logic of the creation of public goods away from a market dominated by commercial interest into a market where all three of these modes of production are going to be operating side by side in different ways.

Well, I can see how all this produces much wringing of hands and furrowing of brows in the USA, but in the UK I think the public good model is already existant in a useable form - its called the BBC. Shirky feels that the Investigative Eggs should not be placed in one basket, however - but as the BBC is publicly funded and thus eminently API-able, it could drive a whole ecosystem of social production - and it need not be Freeconomics, for, as Shirky notes elsewhere its probably a lot cheaper to pay the social sphere than the full time commercial sphere journalist.

But, and this is an observation rather than a question - why, if the horoscope reading, classified circling, coupon clipping classes were actually just subsidising the 10% who wanted to read about weighty issues, was it not possible to dis-aggregate them in the Print world? Why not a pure classified paper, a pure crossword paper, a pure coupon paper etc? And this is where it gets interesting - they did exist, but never achieved massive penetration like newspapers. There are only so many horoscopes you can read in a day. To be sure, many low-brow papers tried to run without any expensive investigative journalism (the British red tops like the Sun for example by and large replaced Our Man in Havana with Our Girl in Havering, with her top off) but - and this is I think the critical issue - they tend not to attract the sort of people many advertisers want to reach - wealthier ones. This, in my view, is why newspaper barons over the ages - many very commercially astute - have carried on doing well by doing good.

Thus there was a healthy market for papers that served well read - and wealthier - people. To my mind, Shirky may thus have missed a trick. Those people haven't gone away - look at the FT and Economist today! What may be occurring is that the disconnect between new media and old media models has driven a value gap temporarily in advertising revenues.

Why do I say this? Take me for example - I am the same bod whether I spend an hour reading the Times online or off. Its the same hour of my attention, you can divide my income past and future by hour and find its the same share of my net present value whether I read online or off. And yet it is far cheaper to serve the same Ad to me online. Doesn't make sense. Worse than that, I don't "do" horoscopes, hardly do a crossword, can't be arsed with coupons* and never watch ads when I'm hunting a classified bargain. You wanna reach me - talk to me when I'm reading interesting, thought expanding stuff. That is why I think that, whereas Clay is right in that there is a 70 year Schumpeterian shift, a 100 year resettling of the ways etc etc, there is also a 5 year arbitrage in the valuation of my attention, and that will be closed. And in closing that, News value will re-emerge.

But just in case, lets start talking to the BBC about open news API's................

* unless the discount is really good, like 50%