Smalera quoting Rich quoting Shirky

As is often the case, Frank Rich today is a must read. Though I don’t necessarily think he’s infallible in this piece–(“It’s immaterial whether we find the fruits of their labors on paper, a laptop screen, a BlackBerry, a Kindle or podcast.” I disagree, as whatever device the news is on is going to speak very much to the business model that supports it.)–he is more often right than not: “But someone — and certainly not the government, with all its conflicted interests — must pay for this content and make every effort to police its fairness and accuracy. If we lose the last major news-gathering operations still standing, there will be no news on Google News unless Google shells out to replace them. It won’t.”

Lastly I got a little thrill up my leg when Rich mentioned the Shirky quote I have adopted for this blog– not that thousands of others haven’t read the piece, but hey, still nice to know someone else sees things through the same lens.

One of the freshest commentators on Internet culture, Clay Shirky, has written, correctly, that nobody really knows what form journalism will take in the evolving post-newspaper era. Looking back to the unpredictable social and cultural upheavals brought about by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, he writes, “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.” So who will do the heavy journalistic lifting? “Whatever works.” Every experiment must be tried, professional and amateur, whether by institutions like The Times or “some 19-year-old kid few of us have heard of.”

Lastly, while Shirky and Rich sound content or at least desperate enough to trust the 19 year old to reinvent the media business, I’m all for much more organized and thoughtful incubation of new approaches to the media and specifically journalism business. Small companies with outside investors, trying new things, in order to figure out what’s going to work. Sound familar?

Take a few minutes and read the Rich Op-Ed today: Op-Ed Columnist – The American Press on Suicide Watch – NYTimes.com.