Clay Shirky - "You're gonna miss us when we're gone has never been much of a business model"

So today must be a day to write about the newspaper business. Here is another good post from another favorite author, Clay Shirky.

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem....

...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....

Last year Clay Shirky wrote Here Comes Everybody a book about how online collaboration has changed different areas of society. One of my favorite examples of this is Consumerist.com now owned by Consumer Reports.