The Political Graveyard
There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.
Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.
I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.
Saving newspapers
Fred Clark examines Walter Isaacson’s recent Time cover story:
His big solution, in short, is that somebody needs to invent some kind of convenient micropayment system that would allow newspapers to charge for the online content we’re currently giving away for free. Web advertising, Isaacson figures, will never produce sufficient revenue to cover the cost of producing all that free content.
Well, maybe that would help. Partly. Perhaps. Although I’m far from convinced that newspapers are really suffering from a problem of insufficient revenue as much as they are from a problem of foolishly inappropriate revenue expectations.
Oh yes all that, and then the added problem of any such magical micropayment system breaking the freaking Internet. As in, suddenly an entire class of Web pages are available only to users with Web browsers and operating systems blessed by content providers. It would be like the old browser wars all over again, except that anyone using a minority Web browser or operating system will be left out in the cold. A good rule of thumb: if you’re considering a Web policy that will lock some users out, it’s a bad idea. Don’t do it.
But I agree with Fred that newspapers are dying and there’s little we can do to prevent that. What we need to do, somehow, is figure out how to preserve the best qualities of newspapers in this new media world.
Part of the problem is right there in the name: e-book. In the print world, the word “book” is used to refer to both the content and the medium. In the digital realm, “e-book” refers to the content only—or rather, that’s the intention. Unfortunately, the conflation of these two concepts in the nomenclature of print naturally carries over to the digital terminology, much to the confusion of all.
This is not the case with music, for example, where the medium and the content are separate. The medium changes—vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, MP3—but music is still music. Music is the product. Music is what you’re buying. The medium is just a vessel, and that vessel changes ruthlessly. When a better, cheaper, faster, or more convenient medium appears, the music follows—with or without the content owners.
Northwestern's Medill School is looking for a few good coders wanting to earn a master's degree in journalism
Google settles with book publishers, becomes bookseller
The old model buys books from authors and publishes them. It’s dying, just like all traditional print models.
The new model is more like a literary agent: edit, package, and market the text, in exchange for a portion of the profits (NOT royalties). The “publisher” doesn’t actually publish the book—Google and Amazon do, as a print-on-demand service.
Discuss.
At Frankfurt, Many Say Digital Will Take Over Print Books by 2018
Reading between the lines here, it looks like the Internet is making certain types of books obsolete. BUT (and this is a big deal) not everything.
While 39 percent of respondents agreed that online bookselling was the most important industry development in the 60-year history of the fair, some 25 percent forecasted that the traditional retail bookseller would be obsolete in the next 60 years; the literary agent (21%) and the editor (14 per cent) also were said to be facing a slow demise.
See, the doom-and-gloom forgets that people don’t buy book solely for reading. A book is a device for transferring information, sure — just like a newspaper, and those have been facing some issues of their own lately. So perhaps the Scott McClellan expose-type books will be going away for good. But on the other hand, certain categories of books are bought just as much for their physical existence as objects as they are for the information they contain. And those books won’t be going away. We may not have bookstores, but we will have coffee table books, cookbooks, and big honking literary novels. Trust me.
Publishers should all have a /covers directory
BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow:
… publishers should create default directories called “covers” at their server-root (e.g., tor.com/covers, harpercollins.co.uk/covers, etc) filled with high-rez PNGs or JPGs (or both) named after the book’s ISBN — for Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, it would be http://harpercollins.co.uk/0060530928.png. Tweak your robots.txt file to make sure the search-engines all crawl these directories, so when you search on images.google.com or images.yahoo.com for an ISBN, the publisher’s high-rez would be right there at the top.
Noted.
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At the same time, most organizations are pretty lax on their definition of “press.” When I was in j-school, we needed press credentials to get into the county jail to write a story on overcrowding there. Our professor made us nice ID cards that nevertheless identified us as contributors to one of the j-school’s blogs. The fact that we had verification that we were writing for something, though, was apparently enough.
