Will we miss newspapers or welcome lawyers?

Clay Shirky weighed in with some good comments on why the demise of newspapers will mean a rise in corruption in politics and other bad behaviors.

n the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

I think he’s probably wrong, that something else will emerge. There will always be lawyers with principles or ambitions to power who will attack low-grade corruption; newspapers expose things and embarrass people, but the lawyers tend to be the ones to do something about it.
Much of the rest of his talk will matter mostly to people like me, who work in the media and wonder how much longer we can say that.
In that vein, he cites three publications that have successfully charged for their content, or kept it from free riders: the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Economist. Shirky explains their success away by calling them stock pickers books. That’s not quite true of the Economist, and as the Wall Street Journal becomes more of a traditional Murdoch paper, it’s less true of it. There must be something else to it. Fortune, Forbes and Business Week also move markets, but they each seem to have seats in Charon’s boat. Of course, none of the latter three did much to wall off their online content, which may be why they’re lagging so badly. But would anyone now pay for Business Week or Forbes online?

His discussion of why the Boston Globe reports on Catholic Church abuses sparked an international incident in 2002 when similar stories a decade earlier did not was also interesting. I remember being shocked at the shock; I had lived in Boston area in 1992 and thought it was an odd reaction. Shirky credits the internet, but as one of his questioners points out, nobody picked up on the Boston Phoenix coverage of the issue in 2002. Perhaps there was something else going on, the same thing that would explain why the Da Vinci Code sold so well though Angels and Demons had not.
Here’s the link to his talk and some notes about it. I read the transcript, which had some odd hiccups in it, but was faster than listening to the speech.