If you don’t get it, and want to read just one smart thing about the current travails of America’s daily newspapers, read this fantastic essay by Clay Shirky, who compares the troubles facing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and others to the chaos of the centuries-ago Gutenberg era—and doesn’t waste time trying to tell you it’s all going to be better soon.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.</strong.

Eli Sanders was The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won...

9 replies on “What’s All the Fuss About?”

  5. Yeah, that’s really great, if you think revolutions are always a good thing. We know what’s going to replace newspapers: polemic ignorance.

  6. Hearst Corporation pull plug on Seattle P-I print edition, Seattle P-I publish final print edition, freak out, online-only out, SEATTLE P-I BECOME ONLINE-ONLY NEWSPAPER!

    ONLINE-ONLY SEATTLE P-I WILL SMASH ONLINE-ONLY SEATTLE TIMES!

    And no, I don’t feel like letting it go.

  7. If Clay Shecky is for it, newspaper collapse must be great! Thanks for linking us to these obscure great thinkers of the web, Slog. How do you find them?

  8. Video arcades are a good analogy to what’s happening to the newspapers. When I was a kid, there were lots of brick and mortar businesses that paid their rent and made profits entirely on the proceeds of coin operated stand-up video games. Then home game systems got better. Nobody stepped in to bail out the video arcades, and that’s why nobody plays video games any more. It’s sad to think of the beshitted lives that the current generation is sentenced to. I think I’ll go back to filling the sandbags around my fortified compound in the hills now.

  9. Thanks for posting this essay. I’m taking this point along to share: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

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