Renewing the news

On Wednesday, I linked to an article by Clay Shirky about the crisis in the news industry. This piece from Naomi Wolf also looks at what's happening, and suggests where news may come out in the near future.

There is no way to disguise the reality: newspaper readers, in the West at least, are getting older; younger readers prefer to get their information online, where readers spend far less time actually reading news than print readers do; and, most agonizingly of all for the industry, people who were willing to pay for newspapers are unwilling to pay for the same content on a screen.
But does this mean the death of news, or its evolution? I think we are witnessing something new being born.

A time of epochal shift

We are living in a time of epochal shift. It's hard to believe that the internet as an essential everyday part of life for almost everybody has effectively only been around for little more than 10 years. I began working life as a cadet journalist on a small-town newspaper (The Marlborough Express, in Blenheim). Journalist courses of any kind did not exist in NZ in those days. Since then I have seen whole industries associated with printing come and go - including hot type, print bureaux and prepress film stripping. In fact, the newspaper industry as a whole as we know it is in serious straits, and could conceivably vanish over the next 20 years. Clay Shirky has written a very thoughtful piece on the underlying reasons, and what might (not) replace it. This could be essential reading in helping to understand the process of technological shift that leads to societal shift.