Like this:

Ok. I got it. Newspapers are going to disappear from the face of Earth sooner or later, because, as Shirky says, their business model is flawed. More over, it was able to work for a century  just by an accident that had been corrected with the emergency of the digital era.

And I also understand that nobody knows what is it going to replace the role the newspapers played, especially in gathering and distributing what we still call “news” and its more sophisticated form, the Investigative Journalism.

Shirky believes that society ought to save Journalism not Newspapers and propose that we need to try different models. Most of them would failed but some would succeed.

A handful of experiments are in place already. From the Mark Cuban model, that propose to fund difficult and long-pieces of journalism throwing through the window the ethical standards journalists are suppose to hold, to the idealistic citizen journalism models that count on the free work and will of good people to get the information out, to the still-to-be-tried-in-the-journalistic field model of the 1,000 True Fans.

I have not doubt that some of that is going to work and that an important group or journalists are going to survive this revolution, but I think the decay of Mass Media (Not just Newspapers. TV channels are based in the same advertising model that is falling apart) is leaving blank a bigger space -a more important one, than just where or how to get the news.

Mass Media, especially newspapers, collect, process and distribute information. But just a service they provide. That’s not what they are. Mass Media are the forum -or should be, the place where social debate happens. It is where a named society sees its identity reflected. It is where a regular citizen finds what’s going on in the life of his or her fellow citizens, what matter -or should matter, to people beyond the limits of their neighborhoods, what music is becoming popular, who are the raising starts, who are the ones falling down. Mass Media is the place -or should be the place, where anybody, without the need to be a geek, can understand the revolution of the digital era. It is where people see the whole picture, not necessarily, not just what they like.

Mass Media, particularly newspapers, promote or  derail change. That’s why they place such a big role during the print revolution. They are  -or should be, the place where people compare themselves to what others are thinking, doing, feeling. It is where the audiences measure themselves in the social scale. It is where people of the past century found what to love, what to reject.

We can argue that the Mass media stopped playing that role at some point, that they got too committed to the status quo, the same way the Catholic Church was tied with Aristocracy previous to the Print Revolution. Possible. The fact is that soon, they are not going to be around. It seems what we will still have some forms of journalism. But my question is: where are we going to find the meaning of being part of a “society”?

Marshall McLuhan said The Media is the Message. I wonder what would he be thinking today.

Advertisement