If you own a media company, Shirky has nothing to say to you. He's not concerned with your imminent collapse. Rather, what worries one of the world's top Internet thinkers is the role of "civilian journalists" and the function of employees of big news companies.
"I don't have advice to give to the companies. What matters is not the companies, what matters are the employees," says Shirky. "When you look at a newspaper, and I spent some time doing that with a customer, taking apart a perfectly average American metro daily newspaper in a mid-sized town in the mid-West which had 59 staffers on the masthead. Five of those people were hard-news reporters, and 11 were sports reporters. It is not about saving the newspaper. There is going to be plenty of places in society for people to learn about sports. What does matter and what we should care about is what happens to those five hard-news reporters."
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Shirky will be a keynote speaker at Tech4Africa, for which Bizcommunity.com is the official marketing media partner.
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