July, 2009

How Would We Craft a Subsidy?

by Clay Shirky
The Conversation
July 24th, 2009

I want to react to Paul Starr’s observations about subsidy, which I largely agree with.
To put his observations in economic terms, we have been in the unusual and happy situation, in the 20th century, of having an essential positive externality — an informed public, supported by an aggressive and talented press corps — subsidized both [...]

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Research versus Processing

by Steve Yelvington
The Conversation
July 24th, 2009

Philip Meyer writes, “The second trend is moving journalism from a hunter-gatherer activity to one more focused on processing.”
In the debate over news on the Internet, what professor Meyer calls “processing” is a point of bitter division.
A traditionalist view says there’s no news without a professional reporter to dig it up. This view often regards [...]

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The Newspaper Bundle Doesn’t Make Sense

by Clay Shirky
The Conversation
July 24th, 2009

While I agree with almost everything Steve Yelvington has written about the news business, I do want to take issue with one thing: I think assuming long-term profitability of smaller papers is whistling past a pretty big graveyard, for several reasons.
First, the internet businesses that provide better service at less cost for markets like classifieds, [...]

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From Walter Cronkite to Tiger Beatdown

by Clay Shirky
The Conversation
July 23rd, 2009

When you get four old white guys talking about journalism (45 may make me the baby of this quartet), you usually get re-runs of The Front Page and reminiscing about what a great paper the St. Louis Post-Dispatch used to be. What strikes me about the four posts here is the shared assumption that the [...]

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