If there’s any lesson in all of this, it’s that you can breed an entire generation of really smart people to not think about existential threats to the business if you want to. We happen to be in an environment where, I think, it’s really damaged the print journalism world’s ability to think through the problems, because half the house hasn’t been invited into the conversation until just recently. Right? You know, I’m going to assemble all my print journalists and I’m suddenly going to tell them that the Chinese wall is down, here’s the problem we face, and 10 percent of you are laid off. It’s just not the deal they signed up for. The deal they signed up for was, “We will never have to care how the money is made.” And that whatever the advantages there in the flush years—I think that’s what made this crisis seem even more existential. And, as I said, from my point of view, it’s fifteen years too late, because the talent was encouraged never to think about the revenue.

RJ: So where does that leave the journalists?

CS: Well, it leaves a lot of journalists my age—a lot of people in their mid-forties who are mid-career—they’re not old enough to take the buyout package and scoot, but they’re also not young enough to get that this just how the environment is. And so the people who are going to take it in the neck are the people who’ve spent their whole life in a Chinese wall environment in the “the business model is separate from the product” environment. Some of them will jump to entrepreneurial activities, but most of them won’t. And so I don’t know where they go. I mean, that’s, in a way, the group of people that’s easiest to feel sorry for, because the industry probably seemed so robust and stable. I mean, I didn’t go into journalism, but many of my friends did in the ’80s. It was such a well-trodden path that everybody knew, “Oh, OK, well I’m going to get out of college and I’m going to go to Midwest and work at a regional paper for two years til my clipping file is good enough that somebody at the Post or the Times reads me and then maybe, you know….” It was this completely ordinary career path. And the people who have that ripped out from under them, but aren’t deep enough in their careers to say, “Ah, fuck it, I’m out, you know, I’m just going to go retire and do something else,” that’s really the group to watch, because a lot of them will just change jobs, do something else, I don’t know what. But, some of them may have enough experience to start doing Daily Beast/Huffington Post-like things. I mean, the fact that Smoking Gun was founded by Beth Stone from the Voice… that’s an example of somebody who really had some serious journalistic chops, just jumping ship and changing the business model entirely.

So it’s in that group of people in their mid-forties where, I think, some of the really big surprises are going to come from, because they have the journalistic experience and they also have a certain amount of inspiration built up. They’re not old enough to just take the buyout, but they’re not young enough to be living in Brighton Beach until they work out the business model. So those are the places where I think that maybe some of the new surprises are going to come from.

RJ: And what about the long-form journalists?

CS: The journalists, basically the career-journalists.

RJ: Yeah, but what about the people who are writing, you know, substantial magazine pieces?

CS: Yeah, I don’t know. That’s something … I just ran into Clive Thompson the other day and we were having exactly this conversation. Long-form journalism is, ironically, one of the easiest things to sell display ads against. So, if you can change the cost structure enough, you can actually imagine building whole businesses around that. But, you know, the economics of the ad world are obviously not stable right now. What you pretty much need to do, I think, is start with a list of sponsoring advertisers who are basically underwriting the costs of the experiment. But, you know, again, because I’ve seen my own long-form stuff rocket around the Web, I don’t actually think that the market for long-form is decreasing.

What I think is that the cost revenue structure of printed publications—you know, Time magazine is just a wasting asset. They did the thing the other day, maybe a year ago, they were asking someone for their top ten, you know, “Make a list of your top ten albums,” and they invited Carly Simon to do it. I didn’t even know that Carly Simon had been allowed out of the twentieth century. I mean, who has heard of Carly Simon? But, of course, Time magazine’s readers have heard of Carly Simon, because all they can do at this point, is [appeal] to the people who like to read things like that. So, I think the question for long-form writing of the sort that’s been practiced in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine—I don’t even know if there’s a fifth addition to that category any longer—there may be endeavors that could launch around a display advertising market, but you’d have to pretty much start from whole costs.

It’s hard to—I guess Slate and Salon are examples of places that have done that in one way or another—but, because all content can reach everywhere, there’s just going to be, you know, more brutal competition. I think the number of people who are employed in that kind of work is just going to shrink.

RJ: So, you do think it’ll drop the actual total number?