The transition age.
October 26th, 20091. Hurricane Katrina was, according to most accounts, a 400-year storm. You can agree or disagree with that assessment (I tend to disagree), but you should at least agree with this: A 400-year storm should come around about once every 400 years.
In other words, a 400-year storm is rare. You won’t see many, if any, during your lifetime.
2. Currently, what is happening to the newspaper industry seems rare.
The newspaper has been around for some time, with the modern version tracing its lineage back to the Penny Press era of the early 1800s. From then until now, given some ups and downs, the newspaper industry has done okay. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, for instance, was around for 150 years – before it went out of business in February 2009. The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, published a print edition for over a century — until, in April 2009, its print edition went away.
There is a tendency, I think, to see the circumstances now threatening the newspaper industry as a sort of rare, once-in-a-lifetime, perfect storm. If newspapers can weather this storm, if they can adapt and adopt new and more efficient business models — like the Associated Press is trying to do, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is trying to do — then all will be well.
Is this just a transition stage? Will those newspapers that manage to survive emerge into a new and profitable period of stability?
Maybe not.
Maybe digital media is not really the new normal. Maybe transition is the new normal.
Maybe whatever business model succeeds in the short term will fail in the long term — and maybe that long term is increasingly less long.
Maybe the perfect storm now comes faster than the perfect levee can be built.
3. Once there was MySpace; now there is Facebook.
Once there was Yahoo; now there is Google.
Once there was the AP; now there is the clueless AP.
Once there some politicians; now there are some other politicians.
This, too, shall pass.
October 26th, 2009 at 10:22 am
I have to agree with you. With a colleague I have argued eBay as an example of this,
http://jmk.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/4/369
For a while eBay auctions looked like they would be the shape of online retail. Now they don’t. It had a good run of 10 years. eBay was loved. Now it isn’t.
People look for the one ‘true’ online business that will endure (it must be Google surely?), but maybe business models are just like videogames now - popular for a while, before everyone gets bored and moves on. So you either aim for a quick buck whilst popular or recognize a need to constantly change the game. The implications for investors are serious. For consumers there is ever more promiscuity in taste.
Once there was Facebook, now there is Twitter
October 26th, 2009 at 10:43 am
You nail the real issue, I think. Journalism, as with many professions affected by this “age of transition,” seem to be looking for a solution, an answer. IF they find it, they can fix “the problem.” The problem with “the problem” is that it is fluid, fragmented, and dispersed. It would be like trying to fix a car while it is still traveling on the freeway. It never stays in one place long enough. The best one can do is try to follow closely.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Hi Mike,
Good to hear from you. And tx for the article reference, where you make, I agree, a similar point.
Of course, as usual, you may be assigning more agency (and importance) to social action than do I. I might twist your analogy of businesses as games towards a view of businesses as increasingly incapable of creating (and imposing) self-serving games of consumerism.
The cure for our addiction to the popular is that special something that is simultaneously extremely valuable and extremely unpopular. Something, for instance, like the truth.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:32 am
David, you sound like Benjamin Barber (in ‘Consumed’). I agree that business is struggling to come up with ever more compelling games for consumers, but there is much in the sociology of consumption (for example the English sociologist Colin Campbell’s ‘Romantic Ethic and the Spirt of Modern Consumerism’) that suggests that the work of markets is aided by consumers who are complicit in their own deceit. Consumers and markets play together. For me truth is elusive, but that’s neither a celebration or defense of current consumer practice. Truth must be created and performed (for me). But what truths did you have in mind?
October 28th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Consumers may indeed be complicit in their own deceit, but surely they are more willing to practice deceit than to suffer its consequences.
Consequence may be one of those truths you seek. Elusivity may be another.