Tag: publishing

The Sun on Sunday lied about me last week. Have they learned nothing?

We are dealing with experts in propaganda who will stop at nothing to see their version of events prevail, and on the rare occasions when the truth emerges, like a hernia popping through gorged corpse, they apologise discreetly for their ignoble flatulence in a mouse-sized font for hippo-sized lies.

Russell Brand appears to be a lot more intelligent than I previously gave him credit for.

To make journalism harder, slower, less secure. Great observations from Jay Rosen about the current challenge to journalism from the surveillance state.

Three Things I Believe (About the Future of Publishing):

In fact we are living in a golden age, an age of constant reading. Sometimes we feel like it’s too much, too distracting, too bewitching. But we should realize that this is a boom time for literacy, and we shouldn’t underestimate that.

Can the Guardian take its aggressive investigations global? Good read in the New Yorker about the Guardian and how it operates.

Content as Medium:

The industry seemed to assume that it was the very physicality of books, newspapers and magazines that we craved – or that we required in order to comprehend the idea of a digital equivalent. The industry was wrong.

How to activate faculty to fuel your content. Great set of tips for motivating consistent blogging among faculty.

Digital Archives & the Content Strategist:

Curation properly begins with a mission statement, whether you’re a content creator or a researcher assembling resources: What is it you are trying to say? What does your collection represent?

What is the business of literature?, by Richard Nash, is one of my all-time favorite essays about authorship and publishing. The entire piece is phenomenal and this bit was perhaps my favorite:

It was a sign, almost one hundred years ago, of the book beginning to achieve what most technology will never accomplish—the ability to disappear. Walk into the reading room of the New York Public Library and what do you see? Laptops. Books, like the tables and chairs, have receded into the backdrop of human life. This has nothing to do with the assertion that the book is counter-technology, but that the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.

Add that to Instapaper and settle in for some thought-provoking reading.

Bonus link on a related note is Fetishizing the Text, by Kieran Healy.

The Future of RSS Isn’t Another NetNewsWire:

My hope is that people don’t use this second chance at a decade old technology just to build NetNewsWire with popovers, a Tweetie-like sidebar and Twitter and Facebook sharing. The future of RSS isn’t in the feeds itself. It’s in figuring out how to extract the information out of those feeds and present it in an interesting and non-overwhelming way.

The Archive is a Campsite:

Search is an interface for accessing the archive, just as the front page is an interface for accessing the news. The archivist’s task is to build an interface that offers a better experience than search.

Such a great article about archives and their potential for highlighting the ongoing value of writing. I appreciate the emphasis it places on human touch. Someone once told me that, "Great content doesn’t scale. You always need someone to have their hands on it."