Here (hat-tip Instapundit) is a superb analysis by Clay Sharky of why newspapers are dying – fast.

Clay looks back to the turbulent times of the invention of printing itself, to explain why newspapers arose to deal with a technical problem which no longer exists – how to print and distribute lots of copies of something to people:

Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other…

For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents.

It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.

Now it’s all turmoil:

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah.

What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

Beautiful analysis.

Polly Toynbee and Simon Jenkins and the rest of the daily UK newspaper pontificariat have no claim to deserving the huge access they have had to public opinion for many years, other than the fact that they acquired a strong position and have kept it.

Yes, they were and are good at it. But their skill developed in an age when there were far fewer ways for others who might have been equally good to compete in a free market. Now being good at ‘it’ is not enough. Since no-one knows any more what ‘it’ is.

Now a new sort of Tower of Babel is emerging, this blog included. Much of it is free (alas for me as a writer, great for you as a reader). And ads are steadily migrating to where people are, which tends not to be where newspapers are.

Yup. It’s over for that model of ‘keeping the public informed’.

For better or worse. Probably both.

Wait for the squealing for taxpayers’ subsidy.