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Clay Shirky on journalists, media dinosaurs and the public interest

By Mandy de Waal: @mandyldewaal

23 Jul 2010

As the manic debate about the future of newspapers continues and Hurricane Social Media continues to wreak havoc, Clay Shirky believes the survival of print news is irrelevant. What everybody should be in a stew about is sustaining the civic function of journalism and the future of hard-news reportage.

If you own a media company, Shirky has nothing to say to you. He's not concerned with your imminent collapse. Rather, what worries one of the world's top Internet thinkers is the role of "civilian journalists" and the function of employees of big news companies.

"I don't have advice to give to the companies. What matters is not the companies, what matters are the employees," says Shirky. "When you look at a newspaper, and I spent some time doing that with a customer, taking apart a perfectly average American metro daily newspaper in a mid-sized town in the mid-West which had 59 staffers on the masthead. Five of those people were hard-news reporters, and 11 were sports reporters. It is not about saving the newspaper. There is going to be plenty of places in society for people to learn about sports. What does matter and what we should care about is what happens to those five hard-news reporters."

Continue reading the full article, with video, at www.thedailymaverick.co.za.

Shirky will be a keynote speaker at Tech4Africa, for which Bizcommunity.com is the official marketing media partner.

Source: Daily Maverick

Daily Maverick is a unique blend of news, information, analysis and opinion delivered from our newsrooms in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. There are many ways to describe exactly what we do (and for the price of a cup of coffee we’re capable of talking your ears off about it), but the best way to understand the end result is to experience it. Every part of Daily Maverick is free-to-air and no payment is required, although free registration is required for a small subset of functions and pages.

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Mandy de Waal

About Mandy de Waal: @mandyldewaal

Editor, writer and researcher. *Editor of #TheFutureByDesign & The Africa Annual *Published in Africa's Greatest Entrepreneurs *Published in Rolling Stone Magazine, The Guardian (UK), Daily Maverick, Finweek, Mail & Guardian, City Press, Rapport, Moneyweb, Noseweek; Brainstorm Magazine; ITWeb, and MarkLives. *Before becoming a full time writer, de Waal founded brand agency Idea Engineers, and led the Cape Town office of Text 100.