In my newsletter yesterday, I outlined what I see as the inescapable disaggregation of the current architecture of journalism—that is, newspapers, TV networks, and so on. The Internet’s technology, coupled with the power of the iPhone, renders most of those business designs superfluous, just like Zoom is removing the need for offices and office buildings. This is, I think, inevitable.
Posting this on LinkedIn yesterday, I got a response from Ed Hersh who writes “The problem is — much like streaming — that it’s a LOT of work to find what you want. No more opening “the paper” or going to a single site”
I think to understand what is going to happen to journalism now, in a world of TikTok, X, Facebook, and even Substack, we can learn by looking at what happened to the world of ‘journalism’, such as it was, 500 years ago.
Prior to the invention of the printing press, the only books written were the Bible, and the only publishers of the Bible were the Church. Handwriting a book was expensive and difficult. Think of the Church as the NBC of its day.
The advent of the printing press suddenly opened the door to anyone and everyone making books on their own. Think of the printing press as the iPhone. Prior to Gutenberg, the biggest library in Europe was at Cambridge University. It had 40 books. A decade after Gutenberg, there were 15 million books in Europe. In a way, the printing press is like TikTok: It has lots of content.
To a world suddenly flooded with content, how was a reader supposed to know what to read and what not to read? How was a writer going to get paid, if they were no longer a monk in the pay of the Church? A system evolved out of this chaos, and I expect a similar system will evolve out of the chaos of everyone and their brother making content and throwing it online.
Over many many years, two things helped ordinate the messy world of a democratized and open press. First, literary agents and agencies arose who would represent the very best authors. Anyone can write a book (trust me), the hard part is finding an agent. The agents are the first curators of quality. If the book sucks, no agent will touch it.
The second thing that arose were the publishing houses.
Today, if you want go looking for a book, it’s a pretty good bet that something published by Random House or Simon and Schuster is going to worth your time. A self published book on Amazon (I have a few) is probably not going to get your attention.
The same is inevitably going to come along to ordinate the mess with millions of online self-appointed journalists putting their videos or text online. A system of gatekeepers will be appreciated by all.
If you want to get on the cutting edge of the future of journalism, set up an agency to rep the newly evolved independent journalists, both video and print.
And once you have gatekeepers who can sift through the dross to find the gold, you can also be sure that gold will follow. People have always been ready to pay for quality since the days of the Greeks and Romans.
Tech may enhance that, but it is not going to change it.
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