Archive For The “State of the Industry” Category
The stuff you put on the Internet under your name should be your best work, presenting a novel perspective of insider information that others won’t easily find elsewhere. Never put a crown on your generic crap and call it good, simply for the sake of “being present.”
When your theme is “Web marketing” or “social media,” though, there are so many people churning out the exact same content that new insights come rarely. Some writers get around this barrier by going pseudo-philosophical, presenting gentle exhortations and pep-talks as a surrogate for new ideas. This strategy is akin to deciding that you’ve exhausted your skills as a bartender so you’re going to breathlessly release new gin-and-tonic recipes, each one bold and visionary because you’re changing the brand of gin or the ratio of tonic. Bottom line: It’s still a gin and tonic.
Truth is, the whole AdTech market is screwed up; too many liberties have been taken for too long with consumer data that any backlash or correction really will have a non-trivial impact on the market. But the backlash is necessary: There’s simply no good justification for a commercial firm to track and aggregate a person’s private or behavioral data against his will, then package and sell it for a profit.
In a perfect world, search engines would help you discover what you’re looking for. In the real world, search engines give you what you think you deserve.
Journalism can thrive in the new media market if the industry stops looking at every other news organization as a potential competitor and instead embraces a culture of collaboration.
Flavor-of-the-week hype is great for bloggers and magazine writers — it pays their bills — but it merely enrages those of us who have grown weary of the overload.
The future for newspapers, magazines and book publishers isn’t bright, but disaster is avoidable. If only the masters of the print domain summon the courage to change what they can, while they can.
Newspapers that cannot persist in print form ought to think about shuttering entirely instead of playing the “online first” game. Readers deserve a fair shake, and the recent Booth consolidation doesn’t cut it for Michigan readers.
The simplicity of selling e-books through Amazon includes an unfortunately trend in manuscripts hitting the catalog without a third-party edit.
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