(1) In a curious extension of the dialogue (happily not a monologue) here on neophilia -- to adopt Ed Ward's fine phrase -- I stumbled upon Michael Hirschorn's essay in the back of the March Atlantic on the future of television.
Under the headline "The Revolution Will Be Televised" Hirschorn, a writer for TV himself, writes, in part:
"The traditional TV-viewing experience doesn't have to die..., but to save it, the media-industrial complex will have to act in nontraditional and uncomfortable ways -- and will also have to rethink what 'TV' is. Currently, it means watching a professionally produced video program -- passively -- on a television console that is fed with content delivered as part of a subscription to a cable or digital service. In the future, TV will mean a cacophony of professional and amateur short- and long-form content shipped via a variety of platforms to a variety of devices, only one of which is the Sony BRAVIA taking up too much space in your living room. Then, that content will be edited, poked at, commented on, parodied, and rebroadcast by you the former viewer -- now 'user' -- to whomever you choose. Who gets paid by whom to deliver what to whom in this new dispensation is, as in every moment of grand tectonic digital shift, the $60 billion question."
Yes, it is.
My wife, who has neither read nor heard me discuss this piece, is already talking about wanting on-demand downloads to watch whatever TV she wants to watch. We are, of course, talking about mitigating our hideous cable bill as we contemplate living with less income in the coming months. But it's easy to watch TV patterns change; we have a garage apartment which is sometimes rented, but which does not have cable (nor broadcast, because we live in a holler) as an option. Our last tenant simply signed up for Netflix and watched her TV a season at a time. And movies. And whatever.
That said, I can't imagine wanting to spend any amount of time watching amateur television -- the professional stuff is bad enough. And, anyway, my interest in the cathode ray tube is principally limited to sports and news.
Hirschorn's piece springs nicely from the implosion of the music industry, and continues:
"...The flip side of the music business's obstinancy is a kind of we -need-to-be-down-with-the-kids type of herd mentality. It dictates that unless you throw everything online, you don't "get it." But "getting it" does not necessarily mean giving in to the braying of the digerati, especially when you will destroy your business in the process....
"But as the music industry learned very quickly (and the newspaper industry before it), this model swiftly turns you from a business to a charity, undermining the value of your product even as it brings your content to a larger audience."
Interesting piece, anyhow.
Somehow I am reminded of the dozens of laser discs my older brother has, a product of his years as a rising executive. I suppose they were an imperfect technology, in that movies had to be stopped and flipped and such, but they were expensive and better than video tape and he has a lot of them. And they're worth nothing on the day that his player quits working. This is the problem the digerati have got to work through: We can't keep suckering consumers into buying music or TV or eBooks or whatever and then make their investment useless in five years.
At some point our threat to disconnect from the TV entirely will begin to make sense.
My thanks, by the way, to all who have expressed interest in and a vision forward for our website. The problem we keep banging into is, Where does the money come from? If anybody knows the answer, please let us in on the secret.
(2) Jed Hilley, executive director of the Americana Music Association, forwarded this blog my way: http://www.the9513.com/jumping-ship-reflections-on-americana-music/
It is a curious argument, made by a writer named Ben Cisneros (whose name is familiar, though I cannot place it). Here's an excerpt:
"The official establishment of an Americana music genre has been devastatingly counterproductive to the cause of advancing worthwhile Country Music. The artistic haven they set out to build has ended up to be nothing but a ghetto, where old acts go out to pasture and new acts languish as non-starters. Gary Allan has called Americana "the starving side" and he's right. In building their fool's kingdom, the AMA made sure that there was a place for Nashville to send all the music that was too mature, too honest, too bold, or too groundbreaking to fit into their plans to be America's foremost providers of musical junk-food."
As one of the 30 people who sat in the room and agreed to form the AMA, I should like to assure Mr. Cisneros that, first, no cigars were involved (although I seem to remember a jar of moonshine). And that, really, our discussion had nothing whatever to do with mainstream country music. We simply wished to build a viable community around music in which mainstream country music had no interest, and was going to have no interest. With the rise of Garth and Shania and the rest, mainstream country moved irrevocably from being a niche business to being a form of pop music. The economics changed. No longer were artists able to sustain careers selling hundreds of thousands of albums; they had to sell millions, or be dropped. We believed -- and I still believe -- that this is a foolish business model. And so we sought to create a trade association for good music that wasn't going to be pop music.
Never was it our job to save country music from itself.
As a byproduct of that, we created a kind of haven for artists who weren't young and beautiful, and, another time, I should like to dwell on the importance -- to me, about to turn 49 -- of fostering the notion that good work can be done by and for people who are of more mature years.
(3) The inevitable political digression. I am struck, as an occasional visitor to Daily Kos, by how vituperative the Obama v. Hillary camps have become. It seems like Senator Clinton has created this dynamic, and it is potentially destructive. And silly.
One of the arguments being made these days is that Obama is too young, too inexperienced, to answer the red phone. But if my math is correct (and it may be a year or two off), if Obama were to take office next January he would be roughly the same age Bill Clinton was when HE took office. At the end of the cold war, with loose nukes all over the place. It's a weird argument to make. That said, if we end up with Obama v. McCain we'll have a generational war on our hands that isn't going to be pretty.
And then there's the NAFTA thing which seems to have won Ohio for Hillary, though it also seems likely she was going to win it anyhow. Apparently, again, if the blogs on Daily Kos are accurate, Senator Clinton's campaign actually had a much more direct dialog with the Canadian government indicating that her NAFTA comments were mere politics, and then had the unmitigated gall to turn a similar but even more muted discussion between Obama's folks and the Canadians into a debacle.
Now...Obama's crew didn't handle the attacks well. They spun the 3 a.m. ad quickly, but probably not hard enough. And they didn't deal with the substance of the NAFTA debate, nor turn it back on Hillary. He's going to have to demonstrate the capacity to deal with the Swiftboating world, and he's going to have to reveal some sharp elbows at some point, or lose this thing.
But, look. They HAVE to figure out a fair way to deal with delegates from Michigan and Florida, and it's not going to be honoring the "votes" which took place in January. Only Hillary campaigned (and Obama wasn't even on the Michigan ballot) in either state, and everybody understood those delegates weren't going to be seated. Now, those are probably Clinton states anyhow, but by what margin remains to be demonstrated.
Somehow -- and without the intercession of the super delegates -- the Democrats have to pick a nominee without pissing off the women who support Hillary and the African Americans who support Obama. And the young people who suddenly are inspired to believe in this weird, wondrous process. And the Democrats have to figure it out in about 48 hours.
The last three great white chickens went out the same way their brethren did: execution style, with a .22 to the back of the head.
Which is not to say that I was anywhere near the killing. They had me spreading fescue seed well away from the plucking and clucking, and I suppose that's in part because the seed needs spreading but it also reflects some concern for my yet-tender heart.
Three of the 24 chickens didn't make it into the pot for one reason or another. One of the final trio had caught fire on the heat lamps, so they had to throw out the hind quarter which had been, um, pre-barbequed. We are having gumbo for lunch, which will use up all the okra we froze last fall.
But in the end they ate too much and were filled with fat, and needed killing. Not much of a lifespan, not much of a life. So the story goes. Went. As dumb animals go, chickens are really dumb.
Another batch of chicks -- a different breed, or breeds; they don't really tell me all that much, and wisely so -- is due in another week or two. They're supposed to eat less, produce eggs, be more mixed use and less meat, although the roosters are still dinner. (Sorry, boys.) And then we'll build a second chicken condominium on the side of the barn next to the garden, and maybe we'll rig it so some of the chickens can get out and feast on bugs and such.
If we get the strawberry beds in. If we get the new trees in the orchard caged and protected from the deer before the green bits show up at the end of their limbs. If we get some string up for the blackberries to climb. If we get the clover seed tossed where it will bring bees to the orchard, but not so close as to entice deer. If my father-in-law gets the plugs and oil changed on the tractor, which he will. If the weather holds, which it might.
Meanwhile, the rooster little Maggie dubbed Survivor #1, the sole representative of our first "barbeque special" (the first 24 chicks we got died on arrival; the replacement batch has been tender eating all winter) has all his tail feathers in, and is fine voice. Lucky him, he's not one of the twelve-pound white monsters. Last night he was placed with the six laying hens my father-in-law and wife traded for, and they ought to give him something to crow about.
The question comes what I will do when the magazine closes, and the answer is that I don't know and I don't have to know yet. After all, I get one more issue to play with, and I shall try to treasure it and not mourn until it's done.
But the garden will keep me busy, and I can use the exercise. The quiet. The solace of a spring sun, and mud.
It is argued that the era of ink on dead trees is coming to a close. Perhaps that is true, though it is far from clear to me that what replaces it comes close to doing the same job. I think magazines have rolled over and played dead when confronted by television and the internet, rather than counting their blessings and playing to their strengths. ND's decision to stop printing is a reflection of changes within the economy of our particular publishing niche; it's not a referendum on magazine publishing. Though I do worry that the barriers to entry for other small publishers are far higher than they were when we began.
More even than the loss of ND what hurts is the suggestion that everything I have spent my entire adult life trying to understand, to...master (or at least achieve bare competence at) is now utterly irrelevant. Nobody cares. Print is dead.
Well, maybe.
In the mid-1980s I sold my typesetting machine, a big blue Compugraphic 7500 that weighed 750 pounds, spun an 8-inch floppy disc and produced fairly blurry type, all things being equal. I saw the Mac coming, knew it would put me out of business, and made a choice not to learn desktop publishing. I spent those years writing, or trying to write, or pretending to write. All of that.
The suggestion now is that print is dead, that I should learn to code websites.
Maybe I should. Maybe in a year or two that will seem like fun.
But I've spent years trying to understand how print works. To understand typography, magazine structure and pacing, to build a file of photographers and illustrators who can more than do whatever job I put before them. (And trying to catch up to the software I once swore not to learn!)
For most readers, I presume, ND was about the music. And that's good; hell, that's the point. But for me it has always been about the ideas the music opened up. And it was about the magazine itself, about the process and pleasure of physically creating this thing that we all held in our hands and fought about.
And, right now, I'd rather cap a chicken than learn to code HTML.
(I do reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow. You do know that, right?)
The phone rang not too many months after I'd moved into one of the apartments above Guy P. Lockwood's three-car garage ("no loud music and no wimmin stayin' overnight") at the edge of Nashville. Said he was an illustrator, the voice on the phone did, and had found No Depression on a newsstand, spotted my address, knew I was new in town. I'm not sure what all Tim Shawl said to convince me to look at his work (probably: that he would work for what we paid at that point), but that he was familiar with my friend and mentor Art Chantry's contributions to graphic design doubtless went a long distance.
We became friends, in the modern way: Over the phone, via e-mail, occasionally in person. We both had children, moved further away.
Tim's always been the guy I went to with the most impossible dreams. Build a folk art construction that looks like Dolly Parton (I made it too small on the cover). Hand-draw awards for the Americana Music Association (you should see the guitar he created for Buddy Miller!), paint me a mandolin in the style of Picasso for the Sam Bush opening spread.
There's a disparaging term in illustration for people who don't have their own style. They get called wrists, and over the years I've worked with some really good wrists. Tim's not a wrist. Back in college I briefly dated a gal who drove a Datsun two-seater MG knock-off with a dual carb and, at the time, a defective water pump. One of my stepbrothers is an especially gifted mechanic, and, now, an engineer. An inventor. He hadn't gone back to college when Rose had her Datsun, but he was headed that way. Anyhow...he stood there one day with a screwdriver in his hand and his ears open and tuned those dual carbs just right. We left the car at the shop where he worked with unknown ailments, and he simply built a new waterpump rather than waste time finding one on the parts market.
Tim's like that. There's not much he can't do, because he understands in real practical terms how things were done, how art was made. How art can now be made.
In the making of this present issue, I knew it was almost certainly to be the next-to-the-last one we would publish. Peter was writing a cover story in which we both believed deeply, one of several occasions on which one of us has found something and the other one has ended up writing about it; he didn't remember, but I pretty much stole the Drive-By Truckers from him, and he was way ahead of me with the Bottle Rockets, though I wrote their first cover story...Peter got the second. Once Peter finally heard Crooked Still, it was time for me to get out of the way.
We had zero chance of a photo with all the various band members in it. I tried, briefly, to get them to submit photo booth images, but nobody did. And so I spent weeks banging around for some kind of visual that worked. I looked at a handful of photographic still-lives, thought of setting one up. Kept thinking. Until one day I found this image online:
Now, I was looking for that image. Not that one, exactly, but I was wading through somebody's online archive of Fortune covers, though I couldn't say why, because in that moment I had the instinct that a solution was to be found there. And it was. Later, in a moment of graveyard whimsy, one of us dubbed this the Reversal of Fortune issue.
Other than the cover, there's not much design inspiration in this present issue. I mean, it's fine. The photos are good, the illustrations are good, even one of the two I did under my pseudonym (I'm not an illustrator, make no mistake) is tolerable. But the weight of the gathering sadness got in the way of anything more than reflex and instinct. Which is why one tends craft and hopes for inspiration.
Not the point. The point is this: It's one of the best things Tim has ever done for me. For us. It's a cover no other magazine on the newsstand would even think about doing, mostly because most designers don't look past yesterday for inspiration and in large part because I'm fairly certain every newsstand consultant in the U.S. would tear it to pieces.
Hit it where they ain't, that's my theory.
(By the way: Tim did it all on his computer. It just looks handmade.)
Our covers have never looked like anything else on the newsstand, and it's not because I can't. It's because I won't. (And maybe because I can't.)
Here's the point, though. Whatever transition to the web happens may be fun and good and interesting and challenging. All those things. But it won't involve Tim. It won't involve the other really gifted illustrators who make our pages interesting to look at. And it won't involve the two heaping handsful of extraordinary photographers who make the magazine look the way it looks every issue.
Maybe figuring out how to produce a podcast will be interesting. Maybe I'll even like it.
But I've been putting things in print since I was in ninth grade, back when I started typing carbon copies of the Streaker's Digest, my junior high school foray into muckraking (let this be an overdue apology to Ann and Joy, who suffered too much at my hands). I believe in print. I believe it's a better way to communicate a range of ideas than the web is. The web is a great way to communicate a fact. A news item. But the full tapestry of the printed page sings to me in ways the web never will.
I'm finally playing the bloody Dan Tyminski album, like hearing an old friend while I type this morning. And I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful beyond words to the photographers and illustrators who have made ND such a distinct magazine and a distinct pleasure to create. I'm grateful for the 75 issues we've had together, and hope I can manage some dignity for #75. Some inspiration to go with the tears you will hopefully never see.
But I know what's being lost. I've spent my entire adult life getting to this point -- assembling these people and this work in this one singular place -- and it's about to be gone. It will not come my way again, and I have been truly fortunate these last many years.
The question, then, is what's to be found in its place?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I didn't know ND was coming, either, 13 years ago. Hoped, but didn't know. And, per my earlier endorsement of Obama, I'm big on hope this year.
And one never knows who will be on the other end of the phone.
For the better part of two weeks I have been unable or unwilling to listen to music. This happens every once in a while, but not for this long. And I know why it's happening, but that makes it no less bizarre, and it does nothing to make the mess of my office act like it's going to improve any time soon.
I mean, there's a new Dan Tyminski album on my desk. I'm sure it's good; how could it NOT be good? But I can't play it. Just can't turn the system on and push the CD in. Cannot do it.
So I can't think of any reason I decided to change the strings on the guitar today.
I don't really play the thing, but I was looking for a piece of rope for Maggie in the closet where it languishes, and it's too cold and I'm still a bit too sick to go anywhere and do anything, so I pulled the guitar out because Maggie likes to hit the strings and such.
Since I have spare strings here, and the guitar came with Susan and hasn't been played much in the last nine years, I thought, gee, I'll change the strings. I used to play a banjo (not well, just played it), I used to break strings all the time, I should be able to do this.
Yeah, well. With Maggie watching on a snow day.
Easy enough to unwind the sixth string, but then I couldn't figure out the other end, which turns out to have a cheap plastic plug holding it in place. Quality instrument the first husband left behind, eh? Pair of needlenose solved that.
And now I'm stuck. Somehow in changing phones I've lost a couple numbers, but I did e-mail a musician friend and call my brother to beg help. And there is a guitar shop in town, but I'm not going there because it's a small town and I'm supposed to know something about music, and this is just silly. So I'm waiting.
See...I can't figure out how to wind the dratted string. I used to know how to do this, but it's probably been 35 years. There are, of course, five other still functional strings for me to stare at, but they're no help. And then, of course, I tried too much. Snap!
Ah, well. Best to put the guitar back in the closet.
Paging through e-mail I missed while sick this week, I stumbled back upon a note from a publicist for Random House that simply sends chills. Now, I realize what's on offer on this particular release has to do only with audio books, but it reminds me of the next thing I fear most.
It reads:
Random House has announced that it will cease using DRM (digital rights management) on all of its digital audiobooks, a major reversal with huge implications for the publishing industry. After testing DRM-free downloads on eMusic (www.emusic.com ), Random House decided that the universal MP3 format, which is championed by eMusic, is the best option for audiobook customers. You can read Random House's letter, which outlines its decision, here.
What does this mean for audiobook listeners? By downloading DRM-free audiobooks from eMusic, they avoid the restrictions that come bundled with downloads from, say, Audible.com/iTunes. They can play the MP3 on a host of digital media players, not just iPods, and can burn to a disc if they so choose.
DRM has long been publishers' (and the record industry's) answer to piracy prevention. But, as Random House discovered after testing DRM-free downloads on eMusic, giving the customer freedom to do whatever they want with their downloads does not result in piracy.
eMusic has been a pioneer in offering digital music in the MP3 format since 1998 and in offering consumers lower pricing for digital media. Both have come to pass as major record labels, and now audiobooks publishers, are dropping DRM, and Amazon and ad-supported music services offer lower digital music prices. Random House's decision is strong proof that eMusic is leveraging change in the media industry with its persistent focus on the customer, and increasing sales to those industries as a result.
I have intentionally not fashioned the links because I see no good coming from assisting this enterprise.
Add to the mix the Amazon Ken Doll (which I'm sure is not an original construction, but I don't remember and don't care how the evil device is properly spelled), and I am driven to implore the book publishing industry to take a good, hard look at what digital files have done to the music industry.
The thing is, folks, you don't have to make them available. Nobody is going to scan and make PDFs of entire bound volumes of prose and put that online. So if the book business decides to go full-force into the digital world -- to commit suicide -- it does so forewarned and forearmed.
But the unfettered digital distribution of music has virtually destroyed an entire category of brick and mortar retail, and all but undone the entire business of making and selling music. And let's be clear that arguing the free dissemination of music now makes possible more touring success is a reality for comparatively few bands, even now, and with rising gas prices will serve fewer and fewer musicians well in the long term.
If content is free (see: the present Wired story making the rounds, and, again, I refuse to link), who pays for the content? I realize this is unfashionably old school talk, but until somebody shows me in clear language with dollars and center where the money flows from in this new model (and not in marketing gobble gobble), I don't believe in it. I believe it's a way to exploit people, but I don't believe it's a way to further the writing and creation of durable language and music.
I know. Books are checked out of libraries; so are records and CDs. (And magazines.) Not the point.
If the book publishing industry dismantles its entire structure to satisfy the perceived need of the digital world -- that is, if it does so willy nilly without learning hard lessons from the recording industry -- it will destroy itself. It will destroy one more final glimmer of independent retail in a Wal-Mart world. It will continue to reduce the number of free and independent voices in the marketplace.
Irrational? Maybe. I don't handle being sick well.
But just because things are new (to paraphrase Mr. Ward) doesn't make them better. Just because that's what all the kids are doing doesn't make it right. Just because you could (as mom taught us) doesn't mean you should.
When we wrote, in the press release announcing the coming end of our print edition, that the website would continue on, we did so without much of a firm plan. Before that decision was made we were working to expand ND's review sections (new releases, reissues, live shows, books) and obituaries online. Some of which we managed to get done in a rudimentary form at the same time we posted our closing letter.
But the outpouring of support and good ideas we have received -- that and the fact that I have ended up too sick to work today -- emboldens me to try a bit of market research in this space. We don't know what is possible, not technologically nor financially. But we (that is, for the most part, our long-suffering business-side partner, Kyla) are talking with various people who seem to know what they're doing (and some who don't) to explore a wider range of options than we had, perhaps, considered.
So let me toss this open: Y'all read this magazine. You know what we're about. So tell us what you'd like to see the website be able to do. Keep in mind that it has to be technically possible and we have to be able to pay to have it done, whatever it might be. Try to forget that I'm a known technophobe, but keep it simple so I can follow along, please.
And now back to bed.
Funny how this works. Yesterday Peter and I were interviewed by the kind folks at National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" for their evening broadcast; Kyla's turn comes on "Weekend Edition."
You can hear it here, just so's to pretend I understand how the world wide interweb works: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19246307.
Which is not my point.
Four reader/listeners have responded (to me, anyhow) to our comments that we don't think ND's signature long-form articles (which have run, on occasion, rather past 10,000 words) will translate well onto the web. Three of them suggested we consider podcasting those long pieces, with NPR's long-running "This American Life" as a kind of model. (Here I must confess that I've not heard the show, but, perhaps, I should go find a podcast of it!)
My immediate reaction is a knee-jerk luddite response: good god, not more software to try to learn, not more technology to embrace.
But even I can work a step or two past that.
Something about the idea interests me, but, perhaps, not what's intended. People don't want to read, but they want to be read to? Really. See, I don't live what would seem a normal life. I don't commute anywhere, can walk into town and get coffee, a new book, and whatever the downtown [sic] grocery store has by way of emergency ingredients for whatever dinner is to be, although usually I have to drive to do that because dinner is half-cooked when we find something missing. So I don't have a commuter's need to profitably spend that time in the car or on the train or whatever; nor do I work out at a gym, not anymore. Not ever again, I think, but one never knows.
Read to...hmmm.
My first year of college I took a dreary intro to communications theory class that was in no way as interesting as my apprenticeship at SeaGraphics, learning to set type on paper tape and wax galleys for the many student and semi-pro newspapers published in that shop off Stone Way in Wallingford, Seattle. But I walked away with one nugget which has ever after brought focus to what I do professionally.
People misunderstand at least 50 percent of what is written.
I have used this example for years and years, so if you've heard me go on this rap...sorry. Take a three-letter word: C-A-T. A simple, normative noun, right?
So if I write a sentence like this -- "The cat walked in" -- it should mean the same thing to everybody, right? Except it doesn't, of course. If you're allergic to cats it does not mean what it suggest to me, the fellow who sometimes writes these blogs with one purring on his lap. And if you're a new mother who believes what I suspect to be an old wive's tale (oops, I typed "tail," and almost left it for the sport), that the cat will sleep on the new baby's face and smother the child, that simple sentence with a three-letter noun is fraught with fear.
Now, I am a somewhat combative fellow in verbal settings. The word "curmudgeon" gets used to describe me, particularly by friends. But I like the conflict of ideas, not the kinds of interpersonal flare-ups that make "Jerry Springer" rich. I like for people to get along while they're arguing, if that makes any sense. And one of the things which really frustrates me is that people use language sloppily and listen poorly. Most fights -- most conflicts -- in my view come down to people simply not understanding what the other person has to say, is trying to say.
(See: The Middle East, but I won't digress there today.)
I write for a living. Or, rather, the thing which I am first and foremost is a writer.
That apprenticeship at SeaGraphics and that communications class formed in my head, however, the notion that I could and should try to achieve some greater control over the context in which words were presented. I have nourished this long hope, for the thirty years or more that I have designed one publication or another, that if I could learn the deep and complex visual language of American popular discourse I could better control the context in which the words I wrote (or edited, or whatever) on the page were viewed and understood.
Every typeface in every context in ND is chosen with care. Sometimes caprice, sometimes irony, often with a smile nobody else sees or knows. But they are meant to resonate a kind of meaning that I've spent years trying to figure out. I don't expect anybody to know what I'm on about; it's all subliminal. But it's there, it's on the page, and I think (I hope; I've agonized for decades to try) it helps to shape the way the words on the page are read.
No doubt an actor could read those words into a podcast and achieve some other kind of control (and, to be clear, I realize "This American Life" is narrated by a writer/radio journalist), and I can't guess whether it would be more or less. I do have a distant background in speech (not that you could tell on the radio last night), and so maybe I could achieve some kind of adequacy in that context. And it's very much the case that what I write is meant to sound as if I were speaking to you, though I should also note very carefully that that's an illusion I work to create, that spoken and written language are quite different. As any writer who has transcribed an interview can attest.
I don't mean to suggest the long-form podcast isn't interesting, because it is. Maybe even a way forward. And challenging. But the ways we are transforming (or having transformed) our experience of acquiring ideas...of reading and listening...that's fascinating. And, yes, alarming, because apparently I don't handle change all that well. (Shocking. "Sing! Fear is a man's best friend!")
See...the context in which words are presented is now changing so rapidly that we who seek to create those words have less and less control (and less and less time to control) how they're received.
A fourth writer wrote to argue we should give our readers more credit, that there was a kind of flourishing fiction world online, that people would read past the first page of a multi-page online story.
Maybe. Something to look at, perhaps.
But one of my many frustrations with the world wide tower of babel is that I can't even control what typeface you're reading this blog in. I can't control how the text appears on your screen except in the most crude ways (I can choose bold or italics or what size the type is, sort of).
And then there is the pragmatic publisher on the other side wondering how it all, um, monetizes (bad word, but it's helpful to pretend to know the jargon). See, writers get paid by the word. So a 10,000 word article costs a lot more to publish than does a 100-word review. If, as I suspect online, the review is going to get more eyeballs (sorry, more jargon; I'm trying to adapt), why on earth would you invest money in the long piece?
A number of commentators have chalked ND's coming demise up to another example of the end of print, and the glorious rise of the interweb. And they're probably right, if only because the collective wisdom has already said it's so.
Just now I can't imagine where that leaves a guy like me. I realize that I'm meant to adapt and all, but I've spent 30 years barely achieving competence with the printed word.
On my shelves are a number of old magazines, going back into the 1930s. I use them to swipe clip art occasionally, and as a reference into the design moods of various traditions. It's an odd thing to collect these days, and I wonder if there's been any systematic effort to archive such things. I suspect the universities and public libraries have thrown them out, figuring microfilm and its successors are sufficient. Maybe.
But because they're a physical object, they exist.
Will this blog, in a decade? In three decades?
P.S. Just after I posted this I looked at my morning e-newsletter from Folio, the magazine trade journal. Here's the headline which caught my eye: Meredith Editor: 'We Don't Hire Editors Anymore'. The secondary head reads: Hobbled Jack Griffin at FPS: 'We hire content strategists.'
Reading down, Mr. Griffin is hobbled by a knee injury, not his professional choices. And their ad revenues are still down 8 percent. After spending $600-million on launches and relaunches and web technology.
