And personally, I’m mad as hell at the Times for ignoring my most recent book. For better and for worse, the key to captivating modern readers in this age of narcissism spins around the word “me”. And five: printed information is not interactive. (For example: one year of Sunday newspapers produced by the New York Times is responsible for the destruction and consumption of almost 4 million trees.) Four: since printed publications cannot be searched with software, the information they contain cannot be organized efficiently. Three: printed matter eats up trees and energy and other resources: it’s bad for the environment. Two: printed books and periodicals are expensive, and costs are rising all the time. One: it’s too slow: by the time you’re holding the newspaper about pirates capturing a ship, there have been four story updates that make what you are reading obsolete. Print publishing in general has five problems that it make clunky for our age. The problem is medium of print itself: we are no longer a print-centered culture. Without Google to send us to your stories, you would be lost in cyberspace: unread, unappreciated, unfound. And you certainly can’t blame your best friend in the business - Google. You can’t blame the Huffington Post, or the blogosphere in general: they’ve got the glitz, but they don’t have anything near your talent and your expertise. You can’t blame ebooks and electronic publishing, as the Germans are doing, as they raise taxes on ebook sales in an attempt to boost sales for printed works. Why can’t newspapers make money, repeat advertisers, and retain readers?. What Went Wrong: The Shift from Print to Pixels But ebooks might be one essential element in the Times’s shift from a newspaper industry on its deathbed, to an innovative information industry that is sustainable. That a world-class team of 1,300 news staff would be less captivating than a mind-numbing network of text messages not exceeding 140 characters in length.Įven if the profit from every ebook sold in 2009 were contributed, it would not be enough to save the newspaper, since the entire ebook industry in 2009 will gross approximately 100 million dollars. That news would multiply ten-thousand times faster than you could report. ![]() Never did we dream that the blathering blog would evolve into the omnipotent HuffPo. We were astounded, flabbergasted, thoroughly unprepared. “We must not be caught by surprise by advances in technology.” More than 50 years ago, Aldous Huxley, interviewed by a cigarette-smoking Mike Wallace, warned: ![]() Could the publishing crises have been foreseen?. It’s strange that this situation seemed to strike as unexpectedly as the financial meltdown in October 2008. old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology." In an essay Slouching Toward Oblivion, Dowd writes: ". The Huffington Post - which calls itself “The Internet Newspaper” - reported in December 2008 that the NY Times Company “said it would try to ease a cash problem by borrowing up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters.” On April 22, 2009, it was reported that the NYT had given six- and seven-figure bonuses to upper management, after a recent 5% salary cut to its 1,300 news staff members, and despite a first quarter 2009 loss of 74 million dollars.Įven my favorite columnist, the unflappable Maureen Dowd, is beginning to flap. In the rainforest of Information, every print newspaper in the USA is an endangered species. Most book publishers are cutting costs, titles or staff. Magazines are vanishing from the racks like Cheshire cats in Wonderland - but not even the grin remains. Print publishing has one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel. A gruntled author, whose upbeat book about ebooks has been ignored by the Times, explains the causes of newspapers’ demise, and then offers 11 solutions for renewal, including a New York Times-owned ebook reading device: the NYeTBook. ![]() Can ebooks - part of the electronic publishing revolution that has often been blamed for print publishing's troubles - be a significant factor in the paper's resurgence?.
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