When new, low-cost, highly-convenient subversive architectures reach out to encompass the practices of dominant ones and start feeding consumer demand in the same place, it’s usually a clear sign that an industry is being disrupted. Such has been the purpose that technology has served over recent decades – a phenomenal amount of usurping has taken place across vast genres, everywhere from international steel manufacturing to Microsoft’s once ambitious dream to link the world with one standardized multi-purpose lifestyle package. The features all these subversive architectures have in common are resolutely the same: they’re cheaper, they’re more convenient, and they are market-share carnivores on two types of consumer: those who are ambivalent and those who are ignorant.
This is the jist of the hypothesis of “disruptive technologies” coined by Dean of Harvard Business school and bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen, who I was fortunate enough to see speak at the Oslo Business Summit last month. To witness live examples of these types disruptions in a market-place is both an exciting and terrifying experience – exciting in that the future suddenly looks so different, and terrifying for the same reason.
Nowhere have such examples been more prescient recently than last week in the field of journalism, when two high-quality, equally highly acclaimed weblogs published well-written, erudite and startlingly professional pieces of investigative journalism.
The first piece to break waves was a thorough report on a terrorist training camp inside New York State founded by Sheik Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, the Islamic cleric Daniel Pearl was attempting to interview when he was kidnapped. Daring, provocative, and written with the type of considerable elegance New York Times staffers would be envious of, The Politics of CP’s “Jamaat ul-Fuqra Training Compound Inside the United States” was an admirable feat of journalism by the highest standards and even brought local insights and testimonies into the investigation, quoting one anonymous witness with catchy, breathtaking prose:
We see children – small children run around over there when they should be in school. We hear bursts of gunfire all of the time, and we know that there is military like training going on there. Those people are armed and dangerous. We get nothing but menacing looks from the people who go in and out of the camp, and sometime they yell at us to mind our own business when we are just driving by. We don’t even dare to slow down when we drive by. They own this mountain and they know it, and there is nothing we can do about it but move, and we can’t even do that. Who wants to buy property next to that?
The result was that the exclusive report was ultimately picked up by World Net Daily, one of the largest internet news sites around, and the findings are being followed up by official investigators.
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Article comments
1 - Mr. Real Estate
Very interesting post with some very good points.
-John Mudd
2 - Lisa McKay
Daniel, this article is an editor's pick this week - congratulations!
3 - Josh Wills
Daniel, interesting article- I had a different take over at my blog:
4 - AST
How long have conservatives been complaining about liberal bias in the MSM, and how long have the MSM been in denial? Rush Limbaugh was the first to really capitalize on their failure to serve a huge audience segment. Then other talk shows. Then Fox News.
The MSM just don't listen or think. This is what journalism schools produce and the sooner the big media figure out that they need more diversity, both political and social, the sooner they'll save their butts. If I were running a newspaper, I'd go back to training my own reporters and avoid J-schools like the plague.
Meanwhile, blogs are eating their lunch, demonstrating every minute of the day that people without journalism degrees can think, write and persuade, unhindered by the templates imposed by those programs.