The billionaire media mogul/Mavericks owner/chronic complainer Mark Cuban’s been all over the news for his stance on blogs and bloggers.
It seems to be a very similar argument as artists who were resistant to working in Photoshop or Illustrator had (some still have, I’m sure): that somehow, without actual wet paint on actual wet canvas, it isn’t “real” art.
Saul Kensell writes on the New York Times:
At the Times, our standards for fairness and reporting are the same for our blogs as for everything else we do. Sometimes bloggers work quickly. But that’s no different than decades ago when some articles were written in the minutes before the presses started to roll.
As a publisher, I am experiencing some of the same concerns from our authors. Any suggestion of making available downloadable digital versions of the books, which would have no overhead nor production cost, meaning more possible profit and readership growth for the author, have been met with a cringe or an “I don’t know about that…”
Perhaps, like Mark Cuban says, it’s just all in the name. Again from the Kensell piece:
Mark Cuban suggests this is a marketing challenge. He says we should call it “RealTime Reporting” instead of blogging and establish a separate brand identity.
This means I should come up with a more palatable name than “digital download” or “PDF” or, good God, “e-book” to try and get our authors thinking a little differently, to remember that, ultimately, it’s about content over form.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
2 Comments
I get what you’re saying that content is content is content. However, I’ve got to disagree. Form always dictates content. Content always dictates form. Just as I don’t use the same grammar and diction in a comment I leave on a website as I have on any number of college seminar papers on the same topic, you can’t expect blogs to be written in the same format as print news articles.
And, actually, I’m glad of it. The structure of writing a news article rarely varies. And I find myself, even on traditional news site like the NYT, more and more drawn to the blogs. The op-ed, straight forward, and often casual style is very interesting…even if I don’t expect the opinions expressed to be long-lasting.
As for your writers, long-form works on the internet are still a gamble, and seem most successful when integrated as a multi-media, or somehow interactive website. The idea of reading a novel, for example, as a pdf on my monitor, or even worse…printed on copy paper…makes me wrinkle my nose.
Jude - Thanks for the comment. I, too, can’t imagine reading a whole book on my laptop or a Kindle. There’s no UI that’s more effective, cleaner, less flawed than a good old paper-printed book.
But as a publisher (and a writer), I realize I have to look into all avenues of distribution for my work if there’s a chance, say, that even one more person out there will read the book we publish or the book we write.