The obituaries for the newspaper industry are rolling in with the death of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer .

The Financial Times says there might be two hopes for the industry: that charitable endowments may replace commercial business models and that readers who have grown accustomed to finding news for free online can start paying. I would say both of those are only remote possibilities, and highly unlikely.

It's hard to go past Clay Shirky's powerful insights into the demise of the newspaper industry. As Shirky says, people saw it coming and they did nothing about it. In the years to come, what's happened with newspapers will go down as a case study in business schools about how industries can destroy themselves.

"Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception," Shirky writes. "In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.



Clearly, the industry needs to reinvent itself. The New York Times setting up an R&D lab, something I covered in a blog entry last week, might be one answer. It's not the end of journalism because there is a hunger for information out there. It's just going to take different forms and there will be many experiments. Some will fail, and some will be spectacularly successful.