Newspapers are, pretty much, dead.


Clay Shirky has some some truths: "Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide 'Click to buy' is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really."

The other significant point is that journalists are being kept deliberately in the dark about the fortunes of their employers. When asked to estimate their own circulation, they overestimate it by an order of magnitude. It's the sharp between the newsroom and the business side: "

It's tempting to try to find a moral dimension to newspapers' collapse, but there isn't one. All that's happened is advertisers are leaving, classifieds first, inserts last. Business is business; the advertisers never had a stake in keeping the newsroom open in the first place. This disconnection between the business side and the news side was celebrated as a benefit, right up to the moment it became an industry-wide point of failure.

Last Call [Clay Shirky/Medium]