Clay Shirky

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“Demystify The End Of Print”

April 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some in what is still called the newspaper industry remain hopeful print will have an extended senescence. At least another decade or several more. How can you blame them? That’s still the way they collect most of the revenue. But that’s unlikely. The only two exit strategies would seem to be papers that aggressively (and successfully) transfer to digital-only and those valuable enough to be snapped up by deep-pocketed media companies or technologists who can help them ease their way across this scary expanse. The good news, I think, is that people are always going to want information. The bad is that right now the blueprint for success isn’t close to completed. Even the New York Times–especially New York Times?–has seemed for several years a candidate to be sold to one of the Bloombergs of the world. 

In a message to the talented Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan, media analyst Clay Shirky predicts the death will not be gradual but will speed up and slow down and speed up anew. He also offers four suggestions to the flagging industry. The fourth one, labeled “the most important piece of the puzzle,” seems a stretch to me, an uneasy mixture of patronage and profits. An excerpt:

I asked Mr. Shirky what he thought news organizations, or specifically The Times, should do, given his prognosis. And we had a long exchange about that — too much for here and now.  But I’ll summarize his main points:

1) Demystify the end of print. (“Constant speculation does no one any good, but nor does the fantasy that this is anything but hospice care.”)

2) Do more to cut costs, companywide. (“The most valuable long-term dollar to an organization with declining revenues is a dollar you don’t spend.”)

3) Give huge emphasis to finding new advertising dollars from mobile-device readership. (“The catastrophe of believing that the iPad would bring full-page, glossy, high-margin brand-building to the Internet was perhaps the cruelest trick Steve Jobs ever played on the media industry, already a long list.”)

4) Think of subscribership as membership. In short, get some percentage of the loyal readers of The Times to pay more — some of them a lot more — to support what Mr. Shirky calls their “indispensable paper.” This is the most important piece of the puzzle, he believes.•

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“The Transformation Came Too Late To Rescue Its Reputation For Technical Competence”

February 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The private sector is often as incompetent as the government was in its botched Healthcare.gov launch, despite what techies and extreme free-marketers might have you believe. Mistakes in privately held technology companies are common, launches and relaunches are disasters, sites (like Twitter) have trouble with stability for years. I think Clay Shirky gives this truth no mention in his new Foreign Affairs piece about the Affordable Care Act tech meltdown, but it contains a lot of important points about project management. The opening:

“Late last October, the management expert Jeffrey Zients was given a mandate to fix HealthCare.gov, the website at the forefront of U.S. President Barack Obama’s health-care reform, after its disastrous launch. Refusing to engage in happy talk about how well things were going or how soon everything would be fixed, Zients established performance metrics for the site’s responsiveness, insisted on improvements to the underlying hardware, postponed work on nonessential features, demanded rapid reporting of significant problems, and took management oversight away from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS, a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services) and gave it instead to a single contractor reporting to him. The result was a newly productive work environment that helped the website progress from grave dysfunction in early October to passable effectiveness two months later.

Zients’ efforts demonstrated the government’s ability to tackle complex technological challenges and handle them both quickly and effectively. Unfortunately for the Obama administration, the transformation came too late to rescue its reputation for technical competence. Given that the people who hired Zients clearly understood what kind of management was required to create a working online insurance marketplace, why did they wait to put in place that sort of management until the project had become an object of public ridicule? And more important, is there any way to prevent other such debacles in the future? The answers to both questions lie in the generally tortured way that the government plans and oversees technology.”

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“Through Computers, And The Internet, The Notion Of Amateurs Working Together Is Becoming More Important”

March 25, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Tyler Cowen: "Maybe it is stretching the concept, but you can interpret Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as amateurs too."

An excerpt from a post by economist Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution about the merits of amateur efforts:

“Amateurism is splendid when amateurs actually can make contributions. A lot of the Industrial Revolution was driven by the inventions of so-called amateurs. One of the most revolutionary economic sectors today — social networking — has been led by amateurs. Maybe it is stretching the concept, but you can interpret Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as amateurs too.

Amateurs are associated with free entry and a lot of experimentation. Barbecue quality is very often driven by amateurs, and in general amateurs still make contributions to food and cooking.  The difficulty of maintaining productive amateurs is one of the reasons why scientific progress periodically slows down. Specialization, however necessary it may be, can make big breakthroughs harder at some margin. This is one aspect of the division of labor which Adam Smith did not fully grasp, though he hinted at it.

Through computers, and the internet, the notion of amateurs working together is becoming more important. This includes astronomical searches and theorem-proving, plus collection and collation of data, and Wikipedia; this is Shirky’s ‘cognitive surplus.’”

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