Publishing, journalism and whining
For those who might be interested, I posted my contribution today to 
vid_commentary, which is my discussion of
deirdre_c's "Brick House."
Heh, I seem to have said just this in the past weeks:
"That to me is the interesting part--not so much what the writers of tomorrow will be like, but rather, what's the ecosystem for improving writing going to be like? Because right now, you're basically either self-published and there's no ecosystem, or you're published by a publisher, and then you get copy-edited and legally edited, and all the rest of it. It's that second set of values that are, in fact, more at risk than the writing itself in the current environment."
I agree that while one can crowd source certain types of fact checking (at least for short work), without money involved it falls apart for comprehensive long form work. Some people have tried crowd sourcing editing work and it tends to go poorly. People have little reason to buy in and it is tedious work for anything over a few pages.
But I'm getting really tired of the media's ceaseless flogging of the "future of the newspaper" sometimes "future of publishing" story. If they're doing it for one another in trade papers, it would be one thing. But this is a story that keeps reoccurring in the general media and it's becoming downright embarrassing to see them constantly wringing their hands about their future paychecks. Because let's be blunt, this anxiety has nothing to do with the product (which is what the public cares about) nor the process (which they only sometimes do). It's about people making a living from this work and how fewer and fewer people are able to do it. This is something that is happening to many, many industries right now. It's one of the reasons the recession is going on. As with the auto industry, while loans and gradual cutbacks could keep things from reaching a crisis mode, no one wanted to face the deep restructuring that was needed. Now, with next to no money coming in, people have no choice but to face that they are going to go on at half the size they did before. And because people are equally worried about their retirements it is not, while they still can get work, going to look that way because a swath of people decide to up and retire.
"On the Media" had an entire show on the topic again today, and in one discussion academic Jeff Jarvis posited that what newspapers had to do was turn entrepreneurial. The counter argument was that many of these efforts are failing. And I have to agree with the guest when I say "So what?" It seems to me the whole point of being an entrepreneur is to be pointlessly optimistic and no one launching a business has a guarantee of anything - this is why so many people are employees and not business owners.
Case in point: two restaurants next door to one another and just a few blocks from us. One was in a Bennigan's restaurant that shut down a few years ago (before the entire chain went under). It was vacant for about a year and then reopened as an Asian buffet. I thought this was a terrible idea.
Speaking as someone who likes to eat and lives in the area, I had zero interest in another Chinese buffet. There is already an established, mediocre such restaurant only two blocks away. There are several similar level fast food places in the mall about four blocks in the other direction, and there was a Panda Express inexplicably opening a few blocks away as well. What we did not need was yet another Asian buffet. Within a 5 mile radius there are at least 5 or 6 additional Asian restaurants. I have yet to encounter a really good one in this city, but there are some reasonably satisfying ones. A buffet is almost never good food.
Not surprisingly this restaurant did not provide good food or anything remarkably different from the other buffet place. We used a coupon to try it out and did not go back. It closed in about nine months. A few months later it reopened under new management. It did not, as far as I could tell, do anything different from what the first owner/management did. What's more, a Japanese buffet had opened in the meantime (also not well reviewed) two blocks away. This time the restaurant stayed open about three months before closing.
What, I had to wonder, made this new owner think they were going to do any better than the last one - who had already been very optimistic in thinking this area needed more of the same? I think the answer is simply that entrepreneurs always think they can make a go of things, that's why they keep trying. They're going to fail pretty often. Their biggest problem is also that there are so many other people trying the same thing, which makes mediocre attempts more vulnerable to failure (we now have yet another Asian "bistro" that has opened up within a few blocks of the former buffet). What people want is something different.
Then again, it's also tough to find your market. The second restaurant next door had been vacant for about 10 years. It had formerly been a drive-in hot dog place and had closed before I ever saw it. Around Christmas it was being somewhat remodeled for a new place that appeared to sell balloons. I figured it was a party store, which seemed odd since there was already a party store a few blocks from there and it seemed pointless to have that sock hop set up rather than a simple store front (of which there are a number of vacancies within a 4 block area).
Turns out it was actually some sort of family restaurant, but apparently I wasn't the only one thinking it was some sort of balloon business. The restaurant kept sprouting these increasingly desperate temporary signs on the property advertising BBQ, pizza, ice cream, etc. As of this week it seems to be closed. The location seemed fine for the idea, but I'm guessing the poor choice of name was an indication of how poor the rest of their marketing was as well.
In one interview, On the Media spoke to Yochai Benkler who said what I think needs to be said to journalists doing these stories more often:
"What are we lamenting? Are we lamenting the decline of a shared culture that is relatively dominated by a small number of people who can decide what everyone else needs to know? That is not obviously a state that we have to yearn for. On the other hand, the fact that we have facilities for those who do want to be engaged, to become much better informed if it is easy … from the perspective of a democratic society, this new state seems to be, not utopia, but more attractive."
Some of the comments to this week's episode also reflected the irony of their discussion on how newspapers need to be more local to have reliable readers. The problem with a lot of journalism is the fact that the writers are TOO local - in that they all use the same sources, tend to have the same perspectives, protect the same sacred cows, are indebted to the same interests, and are the biggest consumers of their own product to the exclusion of much other discussion going on in other circles. They tend to talk about what they know an awful lot more than asking other people what they know which, to me, has always been what a journalist should strive for (along with truly vetting the accuracy of what they report, rather than simply transcribing what someone says). If I were to sum up American reporting in one word it would be "insular" -- and I'm not even talking about their near exclusion of international news and perspectives.
I really don't have a problem with that model being overturned.
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
vid_commentary, which is my discussion of
deirdre_c's "Brick House."
Heh, I seem to have said just this in the past weeks:
"That to me is the interesting part--not so much what the writers of tomorrow will be like, but rather, what's the ecosystem for improving writing going to be like? Because right now, you're basically either self-published and there's no ecosystem, or you're published by a publisher, and then you get copy-edited and legally edited, and all the rest of it. It's that second set of values that are, in fact, more at risk than the writing itself in the current environment."
I agree that while one can crowd source certain types of fact checking (at least for short work), without money involved it falls apart for comprehensive long form work. Some people have tried crowd sourcing editing work and it tends to go poorly. People have little reason to buy in and it is tedious work for anything over a few pages.
But I'm getting really tired of the media's ceaseless flogging of the "future of the newspaper" sometimes "future of publishing" story. If they're doing it for one another in trade papers, it would be one thing. But this is a story that keeps reoccurring in the general media and it's becoming downright embarrassing to see them constantly wringing their hands about their future paychecks. Because let's be blunt, this anxiety has nothing to do with the product (which is what the public cares about) nor the process (which they only sometimes do). It's about people making a living from this work and how fewer and fewer people are able to do it. This is something that is happening to many, many industries right now. It's one of the reasons the recession is going on. As with the auto industry, while loans and gradual cutbacks could keep things from reaching a crisis mode, no one wanted to face the deep restructuring that was needed. Now, with next to no money coming in, people have no choice but to face that they are going to go on at half the size they did before. And because people are equally worried about their retirements it is not, while they still can get work, going to look that way because a swath of people decide to up and retire.
"On the Media" had an entire show on the topic again today, and in one discussion academic Jeff Jarvis posited that what newspapers had to do was turn entrepreneurial. The counter argument was that many of these efforts are failing. And I have to agree with the guest when I say "So what?" It seems to me the whole point of being an entrepreneur is to be pointlessly optimistic and no one launching a business has a guarantee of anything - this is why so many people are employees and not business owners.
Case in point: two restaurants next door to one another and just a few blocks from us. One was in a Bennigan's restaurant that shut down a few years ago (before the entire chain went under). It was vacant for about a year and then reopened as an Asian buffet. I thought this was a terrible idea.
Speaking as someone who likes to eat and lives in the area, I had zero interest in another Chinese buffet. There is already an established, mediocre such restaurant only two blocks away. There are several similar level fast food places in the mall about four blocks in the other direction, and there was a Panda Express inexplicably opening a few blocks away as well. What we did not need was yet another Asian buffet. Within a 5 mile radius there are at least 5 or 6 additional Asian restaurants. I have yet to encounter a really good one in this city, but there are some reasonably satisfying ones. A buffet is almost never good food.
Not surprisingly this restaurant did not provide good food or anything remarkably different from the other buffet place. We used a coupon to try it out and did not go back. It closed in about nine months. A few months later it reopened under new management. It did not, as far as I could tell, do anything different from what the first owner/management did. What's more, a Japanese buffet had opened in the meantime (also not well reviewed) two blocks away. This time the restaurant stayed open about three months before closing.
What, I had to wonder, made this new owner think they were going to do any better than the last one - who had already been very optimistic in thinking this area needed more of the same? I think the answer is simply that entrepreneurs always think they can make a go of things, that's why they keep trying. They're going to fail pretty often. Their biggest problem is also that there are so many other people trying the same thing, which makes mediocre attempts more vulnerable to failure (we now have yet another Asian "bistro" that has opened up within a few blocks of the former buffet). What people want is something different.
Then again, it's also tough to find your market. The second restaurant next door had been vacant for about 10 years. It had formerly been a drive-in hot dog place and had closed before I ever saw it. Around Christmas it was being somewhat remodeled for a new place that appeared to sell balloons. I figured it was a party store, which seemed odd since there was already a party store a few blocks from there and it seemed pointless to have that sock hop set up rather than a simple store front (of which there are a number of vacancies within a 4 block area).
Turns out it was actually some sort of family restaurant, but apparently I wasn't the only one thinking it was some sort of balloon business. The restaurant kept sprouting these increasingly desperate temporary signs on the property advertising BBQ, pizza, ice cream, etc. As of this week it seems to be closed. The location seemed fine for the idea, but I'm guessing the poor choice of name was an indication of how poor the rest of their marketing was as well.
In one interview, On the Media spoke to Yochai Benkler who said what I think needs to be said to journalists doing these stories more often:
"What are we lamenting? Are we lamenting the decline of a shared culture that is relatively dominated by a small number of people who can decide what everyone else needs to know? That is not obviously a state that we have to yearn for. On the other hand, the fact that we have facilities for those who do want to be engaged, to become much better informed if it is easy … from the perspective of a democratic society, this new state seems to be, not utopia, but more attractive."
Some of the comments to this week's episode also reflected the irony of their discussion on how newspapers need to be more local to have reliable readers. The problem with a lot of journalism is the fact that the writers are TOO local - in that they all use the same sources, tend to have the same perspectives, protect the same sacred cows, are indebted to the same interests, and are the biggest consumers of their own product to the exclusion of much other discussion going on in other circles. They tend to talk about what they know an awful lot more than asking other people what they know which, to me, has always been what a journalist should strive for (along with truly vetting the accuracy of what they report, rather than simply transcribing what someone says). If I were to sum up American reporting in one word it would be "insular" -- and I'm not even talking about their near exclusion of international news and perspectives.
I really don't have a problem with that model being overturned.
Comments at Dreamwidth
.