CS: Yeah, I mean, what’s going to happen is, basically, the number of people who commit acts of journalism will rise enormously and the number of people who derive most, or all, of their income from acts of journalism is going to shrink. It’s just what happened to photographers with the spread of cameras. There’s just many, many, many, many more photos than there used to be. But it’s harder to make your living just by owning a nice camera and setting up in town and taking pictures of people’s kids. So, you know, I think that changed. And I think journalism is essentially next in line to see that change, to go through that change.

RJ: And do you think this is a problem for the quality of work that’s being done?

CS: It’s always a problem in the short term. It’s almost like when Web sites came out. I don’t know if you were around in the middle of the ‘90s, but, oh my God, it was just like a giant step backwards for graphic design. Or look what happened right when Mac came out. Remember when the Mac came out in ’84, and then in ’87 they announced this sort of “desktop publishing” thing, right, and all the Linotype operators laughed until milk came out their noses. Twenty years later, the Linotype operators’ union votes itself out of business. Because when the Mac shipped with desktop publishing, it certainly wasn’t very good, right? Quality took a hit, everybody’s getting these birthday invites with nine fonts on them and so forth. But over the course of twenty years, quality got sorted out, because in a more competitive landscape, there were more positive returns to high quality.

So I think that’s going to happen here. The average quality of something written is going to fall to the floor because of the volume of written material. But the competition will mean that the premium for having something especially interesting is going to rise. And then, over the course of the next ten years, we’ll sort ourselves out into some sort of new equilibrium. Five years ago, I think I would have bet on the newspapers as they exist today being a big part of that new equilibrium—but, you know, they’ve done very, very little and been really unimaginative. So now, I think, if I had to make the same bet, I’d say most newspapers aren’t going to survive. Every bit of concern around the Web is, “How can we raise revenues to our existing cost structure?” rather than “How can we lower our cost structure to meet our existing revenues?”

RJ: I could keep talking about this forever.

CS: It’s a really interesting problem.

This article is part of the online supplement to the November/December print issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. To read that issue’s cover story, entitled “Overload!: Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information”, click here.