OutWithABang celebrates its first birthday on Monday; we threw our very first pebble into this deep and dark pond of ours on March 16th, 2008 – two nights after me, Paul and Tim all heard we’d been bombed in the Knight News Challenge. Beaten by some bloke called Berners-Lee.
I mean, for f*ck’s sake, what did he ever do?
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MyFootballWriter.com is now a little more than three years old; it stemmed out of my ‘Road To Damascus’ moment on my 40th birthday – January 16th, 2006. Bored at work – the next Evening News back page I had to fill was some 21 hours away and they needed 450 words before then – I read a piece in MediaGuardian talking to Messrs Newmark and Shirky.
Two boys with a lot to answer for, me thinks.
I quoted Shirky again in that first-ever blog on OWAB; I’ll do it again now. Changed my life. For better – and, potentially, worse.
“In the same way that there’s a split between the music industry and the recording industry, there’s a split between writers and the newspaper industry.
“The recording industry is in trouble but the music industry is not, because musicians still make music and people still care about music enormously. The people who sell plastic circles with the music on it, on the other hand, are in real trouble.
“So if you base your business model on producing plastic circles, or, by analogy, staining wood with ink, you’re going to be in trouble.
“Do people care about good writing? Of course they do, and it’s the writers who can adapt to the new technologies. The only technological innovation that the newspaper industry is waiting for is a time machine so that it can turn back the clock.”
From there we went to the cheesy ad slogan we were using on our digital ad rate flyer – a document that still seems to be beyond the provincial newspaper industry to produce – that it wasn’t in my little lads genes with a ‘g’ to read a local newspaper, what is in his jeans with a ‘j’ is a mobile phone…
‘The trick that we’ve all got to pull as professional journalists is to get our words and our news to his mobile phone by a means that can earn us all a living.
‘But if there’s one first thought to cling to, it is to take Shirky’s words to heart. It’s not us that’s in danger of becoming an endangered species… it’s newspapers…’
In many ways, we’ve just been walking the walk in Mr Shirky’s shadow ever since… albeit talking the talk as we go.
In part our whole ‘better networks, not bigger silos’ way of thinking is based on Mr Shirky and geography; that our future needs to be geography-lite – which it can be now that we, the citizen publisher, control the means of both production and distribution for the first time since the arrival of the Guthenberg Press…
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For as I read Mr Shirky’s latest magisterial tome… http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ … it was clear that we’re still wandering down similar paths; looking at the world through similar eyes… thinking that it might, indeed, by 1500 all over again.
That there is a revolution afoot… a forest fire raging. ‘All’ we need to institute is a few, organising priciples and dip them gently into this chaotic soup of noise and content. That and a tool for us all to, potentially, earn a kitchen table living…
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Cos read Shirky’s piece again and it’s all there; we are in the midst of a revolution; the Press barons are merely following the canal owners, the coal dukes and the mill magnates into history.
Cos we, the people, now control both the means of production (an Apple iPhone) and the means of distribution (the Web)…�
For sickle and scythe, read lap-top and mobile…
‘When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution,’ writes Shirky.
‘They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
‘There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.’
It would, of course, be like King Canute asking for a towel were any newspaper baron to admit that the game was up; that their world was being ‘upended’.
Where Shirky goes next is brilliant. And as me, Neil, Mark, Matt and Kalv – and, ideally, our Abby – try to put Shirky’s thoughts into more practice – to once more try and walk the walk and not, forever, talk the talk, so the temptation is to ram his thoughts down the throat of Lord Carter and Co….
I guess we can either play the ugly little street urchins scrabbling around in the gutter outside Claridges the next time he invites the LMA in for tea and try and force a fag-packet scribble into his hand as he passes…
… or else we follow Mr Luther’s example and nail 12 declarations of intent onto the door of the House of Commons. Let’s pretend it is, indeed, 1500 all over again.
‘So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?’ he writes.
‘I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it…
Keep reading…
“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did…’
As www.mylocalwriter.com/norwich/nr2 might. Who knows? All we’ve ever suggested is that it’s a little experiment; one small postcode step for journalistic man, one giant leap for, etc…
I don’t know. Maybe it’ll fall on it’s ar*e. But as my Mrs and 53 other decent, hard-working souls stare down the barrel of a redundancy gun at Archant (Norfolk), the tide has long since lapped over King Canute’s toes.
‘Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
‘… Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need…’
Exactly.�
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