Clay Shirky gave a very insightful talk on the future of the business model for news and journalism at Harvard this past weekend. He particularly talks about how the traditional model for newspapers was basically a fluke: a convergence of circumstances in the 20th century, rather than some kind of inherent truth about how news must operate. He argues that instead of creating one homogenous model to replace the old one, that it will and should be replaced by a multitude of smaller, overlapping solutions that together allow for accountability journalism to continue to exist in the ways that we need it to, as a society. In the meantime, though, he thinks things will fall apart much more before they come together in any coherent way, and we will see an increase in political corruption as a result. He particularly points to state and regional politics as an area that will be worst hit by this kind of corruption, because the new media landscape operates well at hyperlocal levels and at global levels, but not in that middle ground of state/region. The full text transcript is on the Nieman Lab website, but here are some excerpts that I found particularly interesting:

On content bundling in newspapers:

the coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it’s industrial. Which is to say, if you’re running a website and somebody’s on your website and they just done a crossword puzzle and they seem to really like it, what’s the next thing you’re gonna show them? Is it news from Tegucigalpa? No. It’s another crossword puzzle. The idea that someone who is doing a crossword puzzle may also want news about the coup in Honduras or how the Lakers are doing — it doesn’t make any sense. It’s never made any sense, in terms of what the user wants. It’s what — it’s what print is capable of as a bundle. What goes into a print newspaper is the content that, on the margins, produces commercial interest in the least interested user. So, in the language of my tribe, the aggregation of news sources has gone from being a server-side to a client-side operation — which is to say, the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is made by the consumer and not at the level — and not by the producer.

On commercial, public (non-profit), and social models:

What the Internet does is it makes all commercial models of journalism harder to sustain — not impossible, but harder. And it makes public models easier to sustain — partly because of the lowered cost, partly because of the [inaudible]. And it makes social models much, much easier. So we’re seeing, I believe, a rebalancing of the landscape in terms of the logic of the creation of public goods away from a market dominated by commercial interest into a market where all three of these modes of production are going to be operating side by side in different ways.

On the gap between the death of old models and the birth of new ones:

I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

There are a lot more interesting thoughts in there, but I’ll let you read them for yourself.