Good Morning Internet

Ear­lier this year, I sub­mit­ted a pro­posal for a SXSW Inter­ac­tive panel called “Why New Authors Should Think Like Indie Bands”. The ini­tial feed­back from the SXSW staff was very pos­i­tive, and peo­ple voted for it in the panel picker.

Over the past cou­ple months, my panel didn’t made the cut for the first two rounds of ses­sion announce­ments, so I had begun to lose heart. Maybe my lit­tle panel idea wasn’t quite up the stan­dards of SXSW programming.

And then, last week, I got this email:

We are very excited to inform you that your pro­posal has been accepted to be part of the 2011 SXSW Inter­ac­tive Fes­ti­val in March in Austin. We received more than than 2400 out­stand­ing pro­pos­als via the SXSW Pan­elPicker — so being selected for the event means that your pro­posal was one of the best of the best of the best. Con­grats!! And, thanks for putting together such an out­stand­ing proposal!

You should have seen my face. “The best of the best of the best”! My panel idea is just like Will Smith in Men in Black!

I couldn’t be more excited, and I can’t wait to into the panel plan­ning process with the SXSW staff. In the mean­time, I’m going to do a freak-out/happy dance in my apartment.

Related Posts:

• The year of adven­ture continues
• My Ses­sion at SXSW Inter­ac­tive 2011

I am extremely excited to announce that my pro­posed ses­sion for SXSW Inter­ac­tive 2011 is now listed on this year’s Pan­elPicker web­site. It’s called “Why New Authors Should Think Like Indie Bands”. Here’s the offi­cial description:

The pub­lish­ing world is wrought with uncer­tainty. Tra­di­tional book sales are down, dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing is in its infancy, and pub­lish­ing houses, faced with shrink­ing bud­gets, are forced to shy away from pub­lish­ing nov­els writ­ten by new, untested authors. The rules of the indus­try are chang­ing. Before approach­ing agents and pub­lish­ers, new fic­tion authors are work­ing to self-publish and grow audi­ences with social media tools. When they approach a pub­lisher with a new novel and a built-in audi­ence, they take note. On this panel, hear from lit­er­ary agents and authors describe the way the indus­try is chang­ing and why it doesn’t mean doom-and-gloom for unknown fic­tion writ­ers. They’ll share suc­cess sto­ries, prac­ti­cal advice, and opin­ions on the future of publishing.

I really hope that my ses­sion makes it through the com­mu­nity vot­ing process, which counts for 30% of the final deci­sion, along with a 30% say of the staff and 40% of the advi­sory board. If you’re plan­ning on going to SXSW, I’d cer­tainly appre­ci­ate it if you include my ses­sion amongst those you vote up for next year’s con­fer­ence. If you’re not plan­ning on attend­ing, I still sug­gest you check out the Pan­elPicker and help shape next year’s SXSW Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence. There are some really excit­ing ideas in there, and I hope you think mine is one of them.

Related Posts:

• I’m lead­ing a panel at SXSW Interactive!
• The year of adven­ture continues

Sat­ur­day, March 13, 2010

With the frus­tra­tion of indef­i­nite delays and unfriendly Amer­i­can Air­lines employ­ees solidly in my past, SXSW Inter­ac­tive began for me Sat­ur­day morn­ing with a ses­sion called “Why Keep Blog­ging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple”. It was a pretty solid ses­sion, so I for­give them for using the cringe-worthy term “tweeple”.

On the panel were pro blog­gers and writ­ers Guy LeCharles Gon­za­lez, Lizzie Skur­nick, Scott Rosen­berg, Josh Fruh­linger, and Emily Gor­don. They shared sto­ries and tips about writ­ing, stay­ing moti­vated, find­ing things to blog about, a blog’s life cycle, and gen­er­at­ing revenue.

The cen­tral dis­cus­sion was whether or not blogs remain rel­e­vant in a world of micro-blogging and sta­tus updates via Twit­ter and Face­book. I never thought that micro-blogging threat­ened to replace blogs, and the panel did a nice job of spelling out some rea­sons why. Blogs serve as bet­ter archives of infor­ma­tion that Twit­ter updates, can stim­u­late com­mu­nity dis­cus­sion, and can spot­light good writ­ing in ways that tweets and updates can’t.

To me, that already seemed fairly appar­ent. I found their sto­ries from “on the ground” much more help­ful, and they gave me hope that I might one day be able to sup­port myself through my writ­ing and web endeavors.

Also, I par­tic­u­larly liked hear­ing from Josh Fruh­linger, the author of one of my favorite blogs, The Comics Cur­mud­geon. If you’ve never read it, you’re in for a treat.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

My orig­i­nal head­line was, “The mag­a­zine indus­try pre­dicts the end of the mag­a­zine indus­try through a frus­trat­ingly obtuse ad cam­paign designed to dis­pel rumors about the end of the mag­a­zine indus­try which they just started.” Con­fused? Yeah. Me too.

Here’s the descrip­tion for the YouTube video below:

“The lead­ers of five major mag­a­zine companies—Charles H. Townsend, Condé Nast; Cathie Black, Hearst Mag­a­zines; Jack Grif­fin, Mered­ith Cor­po­ra­tion; Ann Moore, Time Inc.; and Jann Wen­ner, Wen­ner Media—talk about the vital­ity of mag­a­zines as a medium.

The ‘Mag­a­zines, The Power of Print’ cam­paign will launch in nearly 100 mag­a­zines, reach­ing 112 mil­lion read­ers per month, to pro­mote the strength of—and con­sumer com­mit­ment to—magazines.”

You have got to be kid­ding me. Even Sat­ur­day Night Live wouldn’t make a par­ody com­mer­cial about out-of-touch mag­a­zine exec­u­tives this over-the-top.

My first thought was, “That’s weird. I don’t recall a mob of blog­gers or pun­dits ever pre­dict­ing the impend­ing death of mag­a­zines.” I don’t work for a mag­a­zine, but I’ve been a pas­sion­ate observer and stu­dent of media for over a decade. Right away the basis of this entire cam­paign seemed fishy. I did a lit­tle dig­ging. You know, using the power of the Internet.

Here are links to the arti­cles and posts cited in the video:

• “Mag­a­zines are dying and so are their read­ers.” This is from a very brief AdF­reak arti­cle pub­lished last sum­mer about a Ver­mont Depart­ment of Health cam­paign against teen smok­ing. It sounds like they weren’t fans of this par­tic­u­lar anti-smoking cam­paign. The arti­cle had noth­ing to do with the future of mag­a­zines. [Link]
• “End of the writ­ten word?” This appears to be a spec­u­la­tive piece writ­ten in The Futur­ist back in 2007. I can’t tell you more because it would seem the arti­cle is only avail­able, ahem, in the print edition.
• “The end of mag­a­zines as we know them?” This comes from a Huff­in­g­ton Post arti­cle writ­ten by Cable Neuhaus in 2005. In this spec­u­la­tive piece, Neuhaus spends time explain­ing he’s a “mag­a­zine nut”, then pon­ders a pos­si­ble grim sce­nario for the future of mag­a­zines. Please note that it was writ­ten five years ago. In Inter­net years, that’s epic. That was before Twit­ter, iPhones, Kin­dles, and iPads. Face­book was a lit­tle over a year old. YouTube was three months old. While an inter­est­ing thought-piece in its time, this arti­cle has lit­tle con­tex­tual rel­e­vance in 2010. [Huff­in­g­ton Post]
• “Days grow­ing darker for media.” This is an Adver­tis­ing Age arti­cle that appears to be avail­able only in the print edi­tion. A Face­book con­ver­sa­tion seems to indi­cate that this arti­cle was pub­lished in 2008.
• “Mag­a­zines are over.” Does any­body know what the blog 4 Inch Heels Only is? This is the first I’ve heard of it. The full title of this post is, “Who cares? Mag­a­zines are over” and appears to be a poorly-written, catty, vit­ri­olic, unin­ter­est­ing gos­sip post about the inside work­ings of the mag­a­zine indus­try, posted in March 2009. It’s com­pletely irrel­e­vant to the above cam­paign. [Link]

That’s it? Three irrel­e­vant or out­dated arti­cles and two that are only avail­able within the pages of print pub­li­ca­tions? That’s what has these mag­a­zine exec­u­tives so fright­ened and is the basis for this $90 mil­lion dol­lar cam­paign? (Actu­ally it’s esti­mated at over $90 mil­lion worth of ad space, accord­ing to the Wall Street Jour­nal.)

“We felt it was time to replace the myths with what lies at the core of all great jour­nal­ism: the facts.” For jour­nal­ists, they sure didn’t check their sources on this one.

Not only is the pur­pose of this cam­paign mys­ti­fy­ing, but its entire basis lacks cred­i­bil­ity. These pub­lish­ers should be embar­rassed. The only thing they’ve done is reveal them­selves as stag­ger­ingly out-of-touch. It’s a baf­fling misstep.

The prob­lem at the heart of their “Inter­net vs. mag­a­zines” argu­ment is that they’ve incor­rectly labeled the Inter­net as a medium. The Inter­net is a deliv­ery tool for media, like the print­ing press. Twit­ter and Face­book have been dubbed “social media” which live under the larger umbrella of blogs and Inter­net news net­works known as “new media”. But the Inter­net itself is sim­ply a tool to trans­mit the information.

To think of the Inter­net sim­ply as a new medium is to com­pletely mis­un­der­stand what the Inter­net is. It is a vehi­cle that re-defines all the para­me­ters of pub­lish­ing. Mag­a­zine indus­try lead­ers appear to not under­stand the grav­ity of that idea. You can hear it in the first few sec­onds of the video.

“Heard about the Inter­net? Google? Face­book? YouTube? Twit­ter?” Yes, but those are exam­ple of things you can find and inter­act with online, not a descrip­tion of the Internet. The things you could find on the Inter­net were very dif­fer­ent ten years ago, and I’m sure they’ll be very dif­fer­ent ten years from now. But they are not the Inter­net. The Inter­net is the method by which those ser­vices are deliv­ered. The exam­ples they give hap­pen to be deliv­ered through a web browser. The scope of the Inter­net is much larger than what the execs in the video seem to grasp.

The real dis­cus­sion is this: In order to stay com­pet­i­tive in a dig­i­tal world, mag­a­zines are going to have to find a way to deliver the immer­sive expe­ri­ence of their ana­log ver­sions on dig­i­tal plat­forms. That means using the Inter­net as a deliv­ery tool. But the tech­nol­ogy hasn’t com­pletely arrived yet. Apple’s iPad is the first step into a new gen­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing plat­forms, but it’s still mostly untested ter­rain. The Kin­dle works well for black-and-white text-only books, but full-color mag­a­zines don’t trans­late well.

As long as dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing is in its exper­i­men­tal phase, print mag­a­zines are safe. I don’t think any­one has seri­ously argued against that idea. Sug­gest­ing that there is an army of smug “mag­a­zines are dead” blog­gers is more than a gross over-simplification, it’s sim­ply untrue. Just look at the sources this cam­paign chooses to quote.

Here’s the print ad, fea­tur­ing Michael Phelps.

Mak­ing sense of the copy in this ad is frus­trat­ing. Let’s explore a few items.

First of all, this “surf­ing” vs. “swim­ming” metaphor is absurd. It would seem that nobody involved with this cam­paign has ever been surf­ing or seen some­one surf. There’s a great deal of swim­ming involved.

“A new medium doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily dis­place an exist­ing one.”

Okay, I could agree with that. We still have the­atre, radio, books, movies, and tele­vi­sion coex­ist­ing side by side, just like the above video says. Books are just begin­ning to enter the dig­i­tal realm. But what do the other exam­ples have to do with print media? Are mag­a­zines com­pet­ing with movies, TV, and radio? I don’t under­stand the point this ad is try­ing to make.

Fur­ther­more, mag­a­zines are a sub­set of print media, along­side books and news­pa­pers. Videos, news, pho­tos, music stores, social net­works, and blogs are sub­sets of dig­i­tal media on the Inter­net. This ad com­pares mag­a­zines, a par­tic­u­lar kind of print media, to all dig­i­tal media. No, the Inter­net hasn’t dis­rupted mag­a­zine sales, nor was it designed to. So, what exactly is the point here? Why is the mag­a­zine indus­try try­ing so hard to defend itself when it’s not even under attack? Blog­gers and pun­dits with even a lit­tle cred­i­bil­ity (not to men­tion com­mon sense) pre­dict the evo­lu­tion of mag­a­zines, not death.

The asser­tion that blog­gers “con­tinue to pre­dict the death of the mag­a­zine and any other media to any­one who will lis­ten” would be out­ra­geously silly if I could fig­ure out what it means. Blog­gers are pre­dict­ing the death of all media? Is that what you’re try­ing to say? How does that make sense? It’s omi­nous sound­ing, but frus­trat­ingly vague.

“Even in the age of the Inter­net… the appeal of mag­a­zines is growing.” Well, yes. Why wouldn’t it? The suc­cess of one is not nec­es­sar­ily tied to the other.

I don’t under­stand the goal of this cam­paign. Why is there a need for mag­a­zines to assert their strength? And why now?

It’s clear that these mag­a­zine indus­try lead­ers are frus­trated and scared over some­thing they don’t com­pletely under­stand. But how could they have missed the mark so badly? Why didn’t they hire some­one to explain the sit­u­a­tion to them bet­ter? Were they pur­pose­fully mislead?

How can they not under­stand that their future includes a place within dig­i­tal media? Tele­vi­sion has a place. Movies have a place. Music has a place. Books have a place. News­pa­pers have a place. Guess who else has a place? Can you guess? If you can’t, you’re prob­a­bly run­ning a major mag­a­zine pub­lish­ing company.

I love mag­a­zines. Most every­body I know loves mag­a­zines. I get a fresh stack each month. I read them over lunch, in wait­ing rooms, and take them with me when I travel. I’ve learned about new places to visit, new authors to read, new movies to see, new albums to buy. I’ve stum­bled into many of my pas­sions because of mag­a­zine arti­cles. It’s crazy to think mag­a­zines are dying. You can take one look at a news­stand in any major city and know that. But would I sub­scribe to twice as many if they came to me elec­tron­i­cally, just like the rest of my infor­ma­tion? You bet I would. In a heartbeat.

In the next few decades, more and more of our “tra­di­tional” media will move to the Inter­net, and they’ll all coex­ist in the same dig­i­tal ecos­phere. We will still have phys­i­cal books printed on paper and movies in the­aters. We will still have printed mag­a­zines. But I also think we’ll have dig­i­tal options and alter­na­tives we can’t even imag­ine right now.

So, what does a $90 mil­lion ad cam­paign assert­ing your already well-established rel­e­vance get you? A silly, poorly-written, base­less, out-of-touch two-minute video. Appar­ently, fact-checking costs extra.

To Charles H. Townsend, Cathie Black, Jack Grif­fin, Ann Moore, and Jann Wen­ner, I say this: Relax. You’ve got this all wrong. You’re jump­ing at shad­ows. Blog­gers are your friends. We buy and sub­scribe to your mag­a­zines. We write about arti­cles we read. We pro­mote you through social chan­nels. And when you adopt new tech­nol­ogy, we cel­e­brate you. In short, we’re your biggest fans. I don’t know where you got your infor­ma­tion, but it’s incorrect.

We’re on the cusp of a whole new gen­er­a­tion of pub­lish­ing. It’s clear that mag­a­zines are here to stay, but you need to get a bet­ter grasp on the dig­i­tal tools at your dis­posal. Now is the time for inno­va­tion and exper­i­men­ta­tion. If you’re too busy assert­ing your­self for unclear rea­sons, you’ll miss out on all the fun.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts