“Things are going to get weirder before they get saner.”

And he adds:

“In real revolutions things get worse before they get better. .. One of the bad things I think is going to happen is, I think civic corruption is just going to rise for towns and regions of under about half a million people. Which is to say, I think the old model of the newspaper is going to break faster than the hyperlocal civic reporting can come in its place.”

You can see my complete video interview with Shirky and read the full transcript at the Center for Sustainable Journalism.

It will be the first of more than a dozen interviews I have videoed on the future of journalism.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

He adds:

Any experiment … designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

• People submit tips
• Journalists pitch stories
• People fund pitches or journalists to do the stories
• Stories are reported

Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody (Chapter 11), lays out three rules for successful social action sites like this to work. All three rules must fuse together to have a chance for success :

1. Is there a plausible promise? — Why would anyone want to join? In Spot.us the plausible promise is that you can help fund important journalism that might not otherwise get done. So for me Spot.us passes point one.
2. Are the tools effective? — Will the tools at the site make effective collaboration possible or at least manageable? Will the tools help people approach the promise together? At Spot.us you find a story you like and you push a button and contribute, just as you would at Kiva. It’s very easy to understand and simple to use. So for me Spot.us passes rule number two.
3. Is there an acceptable bargain with the users? — What is expected of the user and are the returns to the user enough to make the user want to participate? Will people help underwrite journalism before they see it? Will the stories have enough value to users that people will want to try it out and then keep coming back? That’s the key question for the success of Cohn’s experiment.

Lots of the story ideas that get posted will not get funded, but that is okay. The key is to have enough out there that people have some choices. The best ideas get funded, the others wilt away — at least that’s the plausible promise.  It’s like Meetup. Many group ideas are posted, a few stick and people find worth in them. Will Spot.us be as successful as Meetup.com? Stay tuned, but one thing is certain this Knight News Challenge winner is  an important experiment worth watching.

Update: As pointed out by Brendan in the comments, in full disclosure, I am an unpaid, volunteer advisor to Spot.us. But what I write here is not seen first by the folks at Spot.us. It is exactly what I would have written directly to them but went publically with it here, although I had advance notice that the site was going live. Thanks Brendan for the pointing out my oversight.

Here is more from Shirky about the distinct between audience and community:

Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother “family-generated content.” A good deal of user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation.

Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a community setting, and a community isn’t just a small audience; it has a social density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An audience isn’t just a big community either; it’s more anonymous, with many fewer ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through the phone, it all comes in over the internet….

This is new. We have never before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast and all points between, but social media gives us that — it’s like your telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it.