“Newspapers Fold. At least 120 newspapers in the U.S. have shut down since January 2008”, reported CNN. Some newspapers like the Ann Arbor News are being superseded by their online identity, while employees at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are holding on for life after news that their parent company has declared bankruptcy.

Earlier this week Clay Shirkey wrote a related piece about the cosmic myopia of the newspaper industry:

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.

Shirkey goes on to explain the options that were considered by the industry early on:

• educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law
• new payment models such as micropayments were proposed
• they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported
• sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

Yet the “unthinkable scenario” that they never considered was that the ability to “share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow” because we were in the middle of a revolution.

When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

So now is not the time to push old models of media distribution, it is the time to experiment. I don’t think anyone really knows whether if in twenty years all online content will be freely accessible, behind someone’s walled garden, or another alternative we have yet to think up. But we do know there will still be journalists, photographers and musicians.