By Chris Carosa
NSNC President
While you’ve been busy working away, I’ve been reading for you.Sure, I know plenty of you read just as much as you write, but what are you reading? Are you reading to hone your craft? Or are you reading to survive another day.
I’m doing the latter. For you. And for me. And, maybe, just maybe, for our entire industry.
At the same time, I’m writing, just like you.
I find the business of our business quite compelling. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Most of my writing relates to business and finance. On top of that, I’m a parallel entrepreneur. And one of my businesses is all about studying businesses and industries to weed out those business models that appear to have the most attractive long-term sustainability prospects.
Which makes the current conundrum facing the media industry most intellectually fascinating.
One of the books I’ve recently read is called Geeks Bearing Gifts (by Jeff Jarvis, CUNY Journalism Press, 2014). He relays a story he tells all his classes. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version.
In 1439, Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg became the first printer to use moveable type. Everyone now knows the Gutenberg Press represents a technological watershed. It’s easy to contrast what the printing world looked immediately before Gutenberg’s invention versus what it looked like a hundred years later.
Namely, the two periods looked nothing alike. When talking about the impact of the Gutenberg Press, this is what we all focus on.
But what about that century in between the “before” and “after”?
Jarvis contends this represents the time we should be concentrating on. Why? Because that’s where we’re at right now.
The Internet represents the Gutenberg Press of our times. It has completely flattened the barriers to entry that for more than a century confined the press to those with the necessary capital. In a way, we’ve returned to the Colonial and early American eras, with anyone in possession of a keyboard and an Internet connection capable of publishing the digital equivalent of broadsheets and pamphlets.
Today, the press industry is a cyclone of old and new business models competing for audience and advertising dollars. As if to emphasize this (unintentionally but quite ironically), many of the “innovative” models mentioned in these “new” (as in, five years old) books I’ve been reading have gone belly up.
We don’t know what the future holds, just like those caught in the maelstrom of the post-Gutenberg century couldn’t predict where things would end up. In fact, the only thing we know is that we don’t know.Just because our industry won’t reach stasis until long after we have doesn’t mean we should give up.
We are the pioneers history will remember, both for our failures and for our minor successes. Each represent a necessary stepping stone to that undiscovered future. For that, our descendants will be forever grateful.
So, don’t cry for what once was, be glad you’re a part of that rare window of time that gets to create the next few centuries of our trade.
