Showing posts with label crying because of the internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crying because of the internet. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Orphaned books


Image credit goes to Loxosceles on Flickr.

Brewster Kahle responds to the Google news. If all goes well for Google, it could have exclusive digital rights to out-of-print books. (Thanks, Dan.)

What's black and white and read all over?


Image via Ranting and Raving.

Google has a $7 million ad campaign running in newspapers, among them the New York Times Review of Books and the Poetry Review in Britain. The idea is to reach out to the readers out there who are wary of the terms of GoogleBooks. Newspapers reporting this story sound gleeful.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Word problems for your 20s


Image via Culinary in the Desert.

1) When your wireless internet goes out in the middle of the night right before a job interview (and you have crucial information regarding this interview in your inbox), and your neighbors' wireless won't work for you, and their neighbors' won't work for you, and nowhere in your section of Brooklyn that is open has wireless internet available, where do you go and what do you have to pay for it? Please list all possible solutions. Extra credit if you don't have to leave your building.

2) If 35% of your income goes to taxes, is your income for your part-time hostessing job less than or equal to the amount you could get for unemployment in the state of New York?

3) If your significant other's car is broken into while you're visiting a city many miles away, and you had pretzels from Sheetz in the car at the time of said break-in, is it safe to eat these pretzels, or do you suppose they will coat your throat with shards of glass?

Friday, October 31, 2008

Two internets


Superstar bloggers are ahead of their time - To paraphrase John Edwards, there are two Internets. First we have the mainstream, casual, prime-time Internet. These folks think of the Internet as a supplement to TV and radio. They get their news from CNN and the "Today" show and visit Web sites they see on TV.

They surf major news sites and circulate kitty pictures in e-mail. They use Google to check movie times and look up trivial pursuit answers, but they don't really belong to the Internet. Their tastes, their lifestyles and their media expectations froze in 1996.

The other group has adopted the Internet as a fundamental part of their lives. They host blogs, use RSS feeds and keep up with friends on Twitter. These people are connected 24/7. They send text messages while they sleep and check e-mail before they put their pants on.

They are young, smart and upwardly mobile, but there aren't enough of them yet. They're hyper-literate, hyper-critical and hyper-connected. These are true alpha consumers. They want to be first with a new gadget, first to review a great book, first to complain about a bad movie and the first to celebrate when an old brand does something new.


Do you think Michael Duff's right? The recent Radar shutdown was a major loss (though that magazine somehow always rises from the dead, no worse for the wear - if anything, more cynical) but I'm pleased all the writers are too stubborn to stop blogging. How does the publishing world adapt to Choire Sicha?

This article is a little strange, but I'm fond of it for managing to work pants into a sentence about compulsive email checking, and for finally giving Choire Sicha and Alex Balk some credit. Ask anyone in my household who they love most, and they will say (a) Michelle Obama, then (b) Choire Sicha. For good reason. Will someone please publish him now so I can give him my hard-earned money?*

*I have still not been paid. I am out of toothpaste. Thanks to one of my favorite kitcheny blogs, I now have a recipe for homemade toothpaste, which includes ingredients that are already in my house (peppermint extract and baking soda donated by my next-door neighbors when they moved). There are two kinds of broke: the kind where you are casually broke, and see being broke as a symptom of a failing economy. Then there is the kind where you accept you really want to write on the internet, maybe full-time as a career, but you end up doing it for free, because not even the internet superstars are paid these days, and you hit a point where you start making toothpaste out of ingredients left in your neighbors' cabinet, because the idea of not spending four dollars makes you giddy. Choire Sicha and I may have this in common. Ahh, the great equalizing power of electronic writing.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Print Is Dead?


Esquire is ostensibly going digital for their September cover.

From a Times article on Si Newhouse and Condé Nast: “What we’re not doing is trying to turn those companion sites into large Web destinations,” Steve Newhouse says. “They’re there to support the magazines.”

Our magazine workshop is in full swing. Websites not included.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Magazine lectures galore


Last night we met Danyel Smith, Editor-In-Chief of Vibe Magazine and Will Dana, Managing Editor of Rolling Stone.

Here are a few quips from their panel:

Will Dana said upon his career's start at 7 Days, "You're not only thrown in the deep end, but in a start-up, there are piranhas in the deep end." He also said, "Right now, the one thing you can't do as a magazine is suck." The second you let up, he said, advertisers will go somewhere with more energy. It's the duty of a good magazine to be first, and to be "smarter, sharper, and funnier" than its competitors.

Both editors agreed going to shows is the best part of the job, and that their first bylines were thrilling. Danyel Smith said the most important question she learned to ask in music reporting was, "Does the record have artistic merit?" She told us that she hadn't discovered new artists exactly, but there was a feeling in the room the night she first saw Tupac (he was seventeen) that he was "a guy worth listening to."

Moments after she was hired at Vibe - where she has been working on and off for fourteen years now - she was told they had to get out three issues or it would be shut down. "The magazine business?" she said. "Everybody's always talking about how bad it is now, but I feel like it's always been bad." Regardless, she is optimistic. She competed with her husband (the Ed-In-Chief at XXL) for a year and a half, and though the business is suffering, she said she has confidence he'll be all right, and that she'll be all right.

"What am I gonna do?" she asked. "Like, cry because of the internet?"

(If you can't guess from my notes so far, we adored her sense of humor.)

Though both editors admitted they were "bitter" about music blogs, they said there is a major demand for edited writing. "I don't care what anybody says," Danyel declared. "Everybody, everybody - Hunter S. Thompson - everybody needs an editor."

Will Dana added, "One media doesn't replace another. It pushes the other to get bigger... To me, it's not yet a matter of survival, it's a matter of quality."

Let's change to another lecture so I can catch up on converting my notes from paper. This afternoon we broke into groups to meet magazine editors. I was in the O Magazine group with Mamie Healey.

She had us go around in a circle and list all the things we thought editorial assistants would do, and why we thought the job was attractive, which was a brilliant move because it suddenly made that abstract goal feel tangible.

We had each written a one-page letter to the writer of the article with suggestions for a piece that had appeared in the February issue of O. In thirty minutes, she'd come up with ways to alter the piece that I hadn't even considered, and she singled out each member of the group to talk about their comments regarding different aspects of the texts (one person for structure, three for changing the lead, etc.). The fact that she'd taken notes on our notes and led a meeting so efficiently really blew us away, I think.

She described the editorial process as like being at the North Pole, and directing your writers to a country below. They'll go to some country that's great, even better than the one you'd aimed for, if you can give them the right directions. You have to ask yourself as editor, is this comment pointing them in a direction that will be better?

She encouraged us as assistants to think two steps ahead of our bosses' needs, and to feel free to say, "I'm sorry, I can't answer your question, can I get back to you in five minutes?" She highly recommended working for a magazine that's just launching; she started at Time Out New York.

The late afternoon yielded a panel of the editors who had met with us in small groups. My favorite quip was from the beginning of the panel. Our dear and fearless leader, Lindy Hess, asked the panel, "Are magazines dead?"

Corby Kummer of The Atlantic Monthly replied, "Wait, wait, wait! Stop the presses - if they haven't already been stopped!"

The majority of the panel centered upon the internet and its relationship to magazines. Far from last night's panel, many of them seemed to think the internet would be the downfall of editors. Lea Goldman of Marie Claire brought up a point I find fascinating: she thinks corporate blogs can't work because blogs are by nature anarchic. Blogs are about single voices, not about company identities.

[I can give you my opinion on this subject for days. Maybe I'll make my two pages of notes into a separate entry.]

Corby Kummer shook his head and laughed, "I'm really angry at blogs, not because of their pure, anarchic form, but because I want to understand what they're saying."

Doug Stumpf of Vanity Fair said, "I'm telling you, [the internet is] the Wild West, but they're going to figure it out."

Tonight we had a lecture by Mr. Mickey Boardman, Editorial Director for Paper Magazine. It's hard to summarize his lecture because it was so based upon the covers he shared with us and his firsthand experience with celebrity photo shoots. He said he always wanted to put a man on the cover of the swimsuit issue, and that their magazine "likes to treat stars like nobodies and nobodies like stars." He used the phrase "hostage crisis" to describe waiting for celebrities who arrived hours late for photo shoots.

If there's one theme in all these lectures, it's a single phrase. "I drank the Kool-Aid." I don't know why this idiom permeated the colloquial speech of magazine AND book people, but it seems to pop up in every lecture. Maybe we should try throwing it into an interview and chart its effects.

Good night, my dears.