Paul Carr of the Guardian formulates a simple, compelling strategy for saving quality journalism as the newspapers all die. The newspapers should transform themselves into magazines.
Excerpt:
What you should do is realise that your strengths are no longer speed, but rather skill, craft and accuracy. Having realised that, you should stop updating minute-ly, hourly or even daily. Instead you should follow the lead of the likes of Newsweek and the Economist and publish weekly.
Yes, weekly -- and not as an online free-for-all either, but as one single, self-contained, tangible, paid for issue, possibly in print but preferably published electronically on devices like the Kindle or behind a subscription wall on the web. The medium doesn't really matter, what matters is that the daily pressure is off, and that you're producing a complete paid for product. By leaving hourly "breaking news" and showbiz bullshit to cable and the bloggers, you can plough all of your resources into reporting the whole story, properly, professionally and fact-checked to the hilt. The blogs have speed, you have quality -- and, given what they've had to put up with all week, that's something your readers will be more than willing to pay for. There's a reason why the Economist's circulation keeps rising, while daily newspapers keep on falling.
In related news, Techcrunch thinks that web companies like YouTube might be abandoning attempts to make money from user generated content:
Across the Web 2.0 world, we're seeing a quiet-but-knee-jerk shift away from UGC in favor of professional content.... Last week, news leaked that YouTube was close to locking Disney up in an exclusive deal for long-form content, and now, we hear of a potential deal with Sony Pictures.
With so much stuff on the web now, a lot of people seem primed to pay money to skip past all the shallowness and mediocrity and make a bee-line for the best nectar.
This week Daring Fireball posted a blog post called Obsession Times Voice, in which John Gruber cuts through much crap and says that real bloggers don't blog for money. They don't blog for traffic or attention either. SEO is for losers and phonies, and checking your web analytics every day is pathetic. No, real bloggers blog because they can't stop thinking about something, and their writing is a direct and pure outgrowth of this obsession.
Obsession has a strong appeal for me, as I'm sure it has for others. I don't think the appeal is hard to explain. Obsession makes life a lot simpler, and this drastic simplification can be more than ample compensation for greater arduousness. It's like being Jason Bourne. Yes, you have to be on the run all the time. But on the bright side, your goal is dead simple: don't get killed. Everything else, like maximizing your tax deductions, falls away like so many superfluous distractions.
Daring Fireball follows a similarly Spartan imperative: write like nobody's business about Apple stuff. Not much room for mission creep there either.
In addition to simplicity, there is a thrilling tautness in obsession. An obsessed person is like a cat ready to pounce, a man on a wire, a soldier rushing into battle.
But I think there is also a deeper, more rational case for obsession.
Through obsession, focus can acquire the property of sharpness. Obsession in this regard is simply a species of doggedness. And through perseverance, human beings have an astonishing capacity for specialization, to the point where what one person is able to do can seem like magic to another.
A few months ago I caught a documentary on cable on the science of the traditional Asian martial arts. I tuned in on a segment featuring a martial artist who could break a tower of cement bricks with his forehead. This spectacle raised a fascinating physics question. Striking a human skull against the cement stack with the force necessary to break it would normally shatter the skull as well. So how does the martial artist manage it?
The answer was surprising, and surprisingly simple. It turns out that no one can break a stack of cement bricks with their head on their first try, at least not without splitting their skull. The ones who can pull off this stunt only gradually develop the capability, by breaking hundreds of stacks bricks of gradually increasing thickness. This allows the bone they strike with to grow much thicker than normal. Contrary to popular mystique, chopping the cement stack is not a function of some mysterious mental state or ancient Asian hocus pocus. It's a function of having physically molded a part of your body into a specialized cement-breaking implement.
A blog like Daring Fireball is like the martial artist's forehead. Its excellence is based on the oldest and most obvious of formulas: hard, focused work, the kind of work that molds you into a fine and lethal instrument for carrying out a particular task or activity. There are no magic short cuts. Obsession will certainly make that work more palatable. But talent is primarily the product of constant and focused application.
Newsweek wonders this week whether it's The End of Christian America. The piece, by Jon Meacham, revolves around two explosive findings in the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. First, the number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation -- the "secular," in short -- has risen from 8 percent in 1990 to 15 percent this year. Second, the Pacific Northwest is no longer the only demographic stronghold for secularism. Now New England, the erstwhile home of witch-hunting Puritans, is one too.
When you add these new statistics to others, the future is starting to look a bit bleak for American Christianity. Self-identified Christians have fallen from 86 to 76 percent of Americans since 1990. The number of people who expressly profess to be atheist or agnostic has quadrupled in the last 20 years. At 3.6 million, they now outnumber Episcopalians two to one.
For some comparison between developed nations, here are findings from a 2006 Harris poll:
|
Great Britain |
France |
Italy |
Spain |
Germany |
United States |
|
|
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
|
|
Believer in any form of God or any type of supreme being |
35 |
27 |
62 |
48 |
41 |
73 |
|
Agnostic (one who is sceptical about the existence of God but not an atheist) |
35 |
32 |
20 |
30 |
25 |
14 |
|
Atheist (one who denies the existence of God) |
17 |
32 |
7 |
11 |
20 |
4 |
|
Would prefer not to say |
6 |
6 |
8 |
8 |
10 |
6 |
|
Not sure |
7 |
4 |
3 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
As you can see, atheists and agnostics outnumber believers by significant margins in Britain, France, and Germany.
Meacham argues that while while America may become less Christian, it will never become "post-Christian." Why not? Because, says Meacham, religion is just too inextricably bound up with human nature. "America, then, is not a post-religious society -- and cannot be as long as there are people in it, for faith is an intrinsic human impulse. The belief in an order or reality beyond time and space is ancient and enduring."
This is a non-sequitur. Belief in a reality beyond time and space might endure, but this doesn't mean that Christianity will endure or remain unchanged. Christianity is just one possible form of such belief. What's more, Christianity itself comes in different forms: most critically, liberal and conservative, modernizing and fundamentalist. This is what is really at stake here: not belief versus non-belief, but fundamentalist belief versus modernized forms of belief; forms of belief that decry and resist modernity versus forms of belief (as well as non-belief) that are adapted to the modern, cosmopolitan, and scientifically-informed world. It's not just Christopher Hitchens versus Dinesh D'Souza. It's also Bishop John Shelby Spong (author of the recent Why Christianity Must Change or Die) versus James Dobson.
Meacham's soft-focus analysis invites too much complacency. The future of religious belief in America is not predetermined. It will depend on what the ideological generals and foot-soldiers on each side of the emerging culture war between modernism and fundamentalism do. It will depend on the effectiveness of the arguments and evidence they marshal and on their astuteness, discipline, and perseverance.
Finally, Meacham fails to appreciate the great opportunity that is opening up for American intellectual life. Now that American nonbelievers are emerging from political insignificance and social marginalization, the stage is being set for a great public argument. This will be a debate about first principles, covering huge swaths of polemical territory. It will be like the massive argument that was waged three centuries ago between the forces of the European Enlightenment and the forces of political paternalism and tradition. We might in fact be witnessing the beginning of its sequel. Except this time, the combatants won't be scribbling their manuscripts with quills and lugging books back and forth in horse-drawn carriages. They'll be using faster, nimbler, longer-range weapons: blogs and wikis, discussion forums and comment threads, PDFs and e-books.
Let the great battle begin, and may we live in interesting times.
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