Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis

 clay shirky reporting:
 ...We have long since entered a period of hybridization — William Bastone quitting The Village Voice to found Smoking Gun and Nate Silver selling fivethirtyeight.com to the NY Times, Andy Carvin and Anjali Mullany pioneering new forms of live coverage from inside traditional organizations, Amanda Michel’s career implementing citizen journalism at Huffington Post, then at ProPublica, then at The Guardian, these are concrete demonstrations that the old dichotomies of traditional vs. new media, professionals vs. amateurs, incumbents vs. insurgents, have long since stopped being real, hard choices, and have instead become points on an increasingly traversable spectrum.
...in a world where Wikipedia is a more popular source of information than any newspaper, maybe we won’t have a clear center anymore. Maybe we’ll just have lots of overlapping, partial, competitive, cooperative attempts to arm the public to deal with the world we live in.
Some of the experiments going on today, small and tentative as they are, will eventually harden into institutional form, and that development will be as surprising as the penny press subsidizing journalism for seven generations. The old landscape had institutions and so will the new one, but this doesn’t imply continuity. We still have companies called Western Union and ATT, but as the communications landscape changed, they have become almost unrecognizably different from their former selves. Likewise, as the presses fall silent over the next ten years, even papers that survive will see their internal organization and their place in the ecosystem altered beyond our ability to predict.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/12/institutions-confidence-and-the-news-crisis/