I think your assessment is right – “Migration is certainly still an option for many individual journalists. For institutions, I think the ships may have already sailed.”

I am a big believer that journalists will have to learn to stand-alone, like modern scribes. That’s partly why I’m creating spot.us – I think there will be more and more freelancers who will need a means to collect money from small publishers.

But – what is certainly exciting is that the future is unknown and “the tribe” is finally on the move.

I think it’s more likely that those kinds of sins have always been in journalism, but it wasn’t until the web leveled the playing field that we found out about them in such great number.

If Stross is a journalist, I think your use of this example is definitely a double-edged sword. If he is not a journalist, he illustrates some of the complaints journalists like to lodge against bloggers and other non-professional sources who don’t look great against serious fact-checking.

I take your point though. Microsoft is behaving as an entrenched establishment, and we don’t know how they will fare in World 2.0. Perhaps the recovery technology giant IBM demonstrated (as another example that has played out) is perhaps just not in the DNA of the newspaper industry?

This may be way tougher than the struggle with/of the typesetters so many years ago.

Surely someone has written well about how to deal with this structural problem of the generic promote-from-the-ranks organizational pyramid — maybe Drucker? Christiansen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” is kind of a special case, then there’s the Peter Principle, also related … anyone have a definitive text?

Thank you. I hope you continue to hammer this point home! Admissions of culpability by mainstream media with regard to this catastrophic melt-down of responsibility are still almost entirely absent from the press.