After 17 years of climbing the ladder, Dan Baum finally landed his dream job at The New Yorker. But things didn’t work out quite as he planned. On Twitter this week, Baum tells the story of his rise and fall. You can read a consolidated Twitter-style transcript here. A pretty intriguing look at what happens inside the magazine world.
PS Find us on Twitter. We’re @openculture
Another big digital archive went live this week. Backed by the United Nations, the World Digital Library wants to centralize cultural treasures from around the world. Manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings — they will all be absorbed into this growing online collection, and users will be able to navigate through these materials in seven different languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian). The collection (to which Google contributed $3 million in 2005) now hosts about 1,250 artifacts, a fraction of what it will eventually include. The initial collection features some gems. Take for example the Tale of the Genji, a Japanese text from the early 11th century that’s often considered “the first great novel in world literature.” You can also take a close look at some Oracle Bones from China circa 1200 BC. Or how about these iconic photos from The Great Depression or these shots of the great Jackie Robinson. To learn more about this new digital archive, read this piece in The Washington Post.
After Seth Harwood got his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he began publishing in traditional magazines and journals, as most young writers do. But those publications were slow to launch his career. Things changed, however, once he started publishing online. And they really changed when he released his crime novel Jack Wakes Up as a free podcast (via iTunes, RSS Feed, & MP3) and distributed it through social networks. Web 2.0 broadened the reach of his work, attracted fans worldwide, and ultimately landed Harwood a nice book deal with Random House. (RH will be publishing Jack Wakes Up in print early next month). In the short video above, Harwood gives you a quick look inside the making of his podcast, and how it brings exposure to his work. If you’re an up-and-coming writer, there’s certainly something here to think about. You can find out more about Seth’s work at SethHarwood.com.
Clay Shirky, who does a lot of good thinking (see his latest book) about the social and economic effects of internet technologies, has posted a new piece on the slow but steady demise of the newspaper. It’s an intelligent, not entirely lengthy, piece. Here’s a quick quote to whet your appetite:
Round and round this [debate], with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem…
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
And while I’m on this topic, let me also direct your attention to a piece published on Mashable by a recent colleague of mine, Woody Lewis. It gives you a good look at the 10 Ways Newspapers are Using Social Media to Save the Industry (assuming that can be done).
via Clay Shirky’s Twitter Feed
A little revolution is getting underway. The state of Virginia has published a new open source physics textbook under a Creative Commons license. As detailed in this piece from ZDNet, this peer-reviewed textbook was produced in less than six months by a team of authors, which included “active researchers, high school teachers, and college professors, as well as some retirees.” And it was launched on CK-12’s technology platform. Here comes the new world of textbook publishing. Quick to press, vetted, easy to revise, produced at a low cost by publishers, free for students. What’s not to like … except if you’re in the traditional textbook publishing business?
As a quick aside, you can find another free physics textbook (in e‑book format) at motionmountain.net.
via ccLearn Twitter Feed (Open Culture Twitter feed here)
It took until February 26, but I finally got my backordered x‑mas present — the Kindle 2 (check it out here). There’s a lot to like about it. It’s thin & light. The screen is very readable. It holds a ton of books (1500). It downloaded War & Peace in a matter of seconds. The battery life is long. And as for the other good stuff, you can read Walter Mossberg’s review in The Wall Street Journal.
But nothing is perfect, and I’m underwhelmed by the Kindle’s new text-to-audio functionality, which theoretically turns any book into an instant audio book. The computerized voice is rather painful to listen to. The rhythms and intonations are off. The subtleties of the human voice just aren’t there. I doubt that this functionality will get much use. But it is not stopping the Authors Guild from complaining.
Earlier this week, Roy Blount Jr., the Guild’s president, wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes (“The Kindle Swindle”) questioning the legality of the new feature, and complaining that it deprives authors of revenue from audio book rights. Perhaps some day, when this technology dramatically improves, Blount may have a point. But, for now, the Kindle doesn’t plausibly pose much threat to commercially-sold audio books. Indeed, you only need to remember that Amazon bought Audible, the largest provider of commercial audio books in the US, and has already integrated Audible into the Kindle. (Thanks Gideon for pointing that out.) Is Amazon going to let text-to-voice undermine its Audible investment? Not a chance. In the meantime, I should note that you can test out Audible’s service and download two free audio books along the way. Not a bad deal.
Here’s a quick fyi for iPhone users: The Public Radio Tuner, a free app available on iTunes, gives you (free) access to hundreds of public radio streams from across the US. Released in late January, the Tuner brings together feeds from NPR, American Public Media, and PRI, among others. This is a handy way to listen wirelessly to local news and cultural programming, plus many well-known shows (All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Car Talk, etc.) So far, the app works like a charm. You can download it here, or visit this web site to learn more about this new initiative.
Lastly, if you don’t have an iPhone, then this page does a good job of aggregating public radio feeds, and you can always listen to them as podcasts on your computer or mp3 player. Definitely worth a look…
What’s the main news story of the day? It depends on where you live.
Newseum has a handy web page that let’s you visually scan the front page of over 700 newspapers across 80 countries. Open this web page, click on a continent, then click on a dot within a particular geographic area, and you’ll see what an individual paper thinks matters most today, tomorrow and the next day. It’s a pretty handy tool.
Sadly, as I looked at these maps, I couldn’t help but wonder (given the state of newspaper business) how many of these dots will disappear over time. Or, as my colleague put it, how long is it before the newspaper, as we know it, becomes an actual relic of a museum. “Newseum” may really become a newseum.
If you want to track the grim demise of the print industry, you can follow The Media is Dying on Twitter. On an hour-to-hour basis, it records the grim unwinding of various newspapers and magazines. And, while you’re at it, you can follow our Twitter feed here, too. It’s a happier feed, I promise.
Thanks Denise for the heads up on this one. Got a cool piece of cultural media? Send it our way.
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