Via a tweet from Dave Winer, an extended analogy between the MSM and the animals studied by Charles Darwin (and now every time I hear/read charles darwin I think of the Bob Dylan Lyric from “High Water”, but I digress). The key point is this:
Newspapers today are also faced with a new environment. The world that nurtured them, that gave birth to them, has changed. The web, new technologies, shifting demographics.
In a Darwinian sense, if the news business is to survive, it must, like the finches, evolve. It must in fact, become an entirely new species.
One that is physically reflective of the environment in which it feeds - like the finches.
This is not a matter of paying lip service to a few ideas to see if they work out, but retaining the old design. The finches that failed to adapt are not here to defend themselves. Like any species that does not adapt, they became extinct.
So too for any media or news business that does not evolve to the new realities around them.
You do not get to have both. You do not get to try a curved beak while keeping the old one, ‘just in case’., or because it has worked so well in the past.
I’ve been writing/talking about the evolution of communication for sometime now, and find little to disagree with here. But one point worth making: it is not the art of journalism that is being blown up, it is the business. The Newsweek series of stories behind the scene about the campaign is getting boffo links and huge readership and represents a great look at the value the “traditional media” can bring; what is significantly less clear is by which business model it can continue to thrive.
In 2002 I talked to Dan Gillmor, then with the SJ Mercury News, about this topic. The question I asked was this: are we seeing a revolution or an evolution? He said something wise and prescient – he said that we were seeing an evolution of communications and a revolution in the business model that supported the existing media.
And so it is.