His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times – and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail."Everyone's waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it's the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don't think the numbers add up." But then, interestingly, he goes on, "Here's what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they're critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn't want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times."
J Black on 01 Feb 09Just because you build a wiki, doesn't mean they will come. This has been my and other faculty members' experiences in using wikis in the classroom. We all know the feeling . . . the excitement of seeing and then using a type of software that should be just perfect to engage students and to enable community-building. We work during our break time to incorporate this learning technology in our course only to find out that students aren't that excited about it. I think one of the reasons for the lackluster student enthusiasm toward any type of new technology tool is that they need to learn it. I'm not saying that students are lazy . . . it's just that the internal question, "what's in it for me?" probably needs to be answered.
