Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable” is an eerie story of the newspaper industry and how it is breaking faster than the new technology that is here to replace it is being put into play. The article is a despondent antiphon to the latest assortment of newspaper online especially when it jumps into a “Nothing will ever work” phase. I agree almost completely with Shirky when he says that the newspaper industry is disintegrating faster than the new model here to “save” journalism has been tested to be successful. My only point of contention is that- even though currently we haven’t found a plausible model to replace the older one, eventually one day we will just because of the nature of technology- old institutions are eventually always replaced by better newer ones.
There have been several business models working towards tech-journalism finding innovative ways of making it better, more reliable and at most importantly a profitable business. Most have failed, but it will be foolish to discount all of them as failures. Spot.US is a viable alternative however managing this sort of a business will require a lot of manpower. Starting from finding articles that are impressive and newsworthy to finding the right newspaper for it to be in, to getting approval from the newspaper to publish this article, to making sure that no one else plagiarizes this article in the meantime requires so much manpower and adds so much overhead delay that by the time the article is actually published, it might not be news anymore. There have been other solutions like online newspapers with micropayments, free headlines, etc. which have turned out to be not so successful business ventures.
What is needed is a more organized and aggressive approach to tech-journalism that not only explores all avenues to expand the influence of online newspapers, but also eliminates all obstacles that hinder its path. Alternatives can only be disposed if they are proven to be unsuccessful. Who said that micropayments are unsuccessful? How did it work for iTunes then? Maybe, the current model of micropayments is not working. Obviously, I as a college student am not going to pay even a dollar for even a month’s subscription to the New York Times online version. However, I also never bought my own Microsoft Office CD either. I borrowed my friend’s pirated version because I am not going to pay $60 for software that is soon going to be replaced by another for the same price with no upgrades. However, if I were working for say a company in Chicago, and everyone in my office needed Office, I cannot lend them my pirated copy of Office, not only because I will get into trouble, but also because Microsoft will sue and make an example of the company that I am working in for using an unlicensed version of its software. On a side note, Microsoft actually makes a huge chunk of its money every year suing corporations. The idea here is- Don’t think people, think corporations. I think it is absolutely tenable to charge corporations a fee for newspaper subscription. They should also pursue aggressive methods to sue corporations with employees accessing articles of the newspaper illegally through the internet. Tie up with Google to do that because Google has both the power and the infrastructure to catch such frauds on a large scale. I am not however going to say that this strategy will work. However, it does deserve research and testing.
The evolution of the smartphone/smartbook concept has led the emergence of mobile news. Newspaper companies should exploit this new medium by having subscribers like AT&T charge an application fee to have an application of the newspaper which gives the actual entire article, in-depth analysis and polls. The actual mobile website of the newspaper on the other hand should only have the headlines. Newspaper agencies should tie up with companies like Apple and AT&T to make such applications and then use their influence to market these applications. After all, Apple has the ability to make not so great products seem revolutionary and ground-breaking. They will make sure your application is the only application every phone of theirs has if you promise to advertise in your newspapers that the iPad is the greatest invention of all time.
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