Clay Shirky on the state of the newspaper industry:
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. … ¶ And so it is today. 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 lied to.
He doesn’t know how it will end, but he’s confident enough that we will muddle through with a variety of experimental models until things settle down in a new, stable system. We must try everything until we find the adaptations that work.