Topic: The Future is Now

March 2009

Notes on Steven Johnson on the News, Part the First

Well, I ain’t at SXSW, but damn, a man can’t just give that sort of excuse when the time comes to look at the changes in the news business and highlight how one might view current issues in publishing in that light. Clary Skirky, already in progress, and now Steven Johnson. Batch one of reactions.

Let me say one final thing. I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell.

I’ll discuss that anon.

But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two.

Well, it’s less the specifically financial meltdown and more the economic meltdown that resulted in advertising revenues that fell far faster than they would otherwise have. But yup, that’s basically right, though a bit overly generous to the companies that owned the news media, I think.

That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work.

I expect most folks reading this personally know people in both the news and in book publishing who are those very people.

But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.

The kicker. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing happening in the book business. Yet another world is possible.

Richard Eoin Nash, Mar 14, 2009

Notes On Clay Shirky on the News, Part the First

Over the weekend, I’m responding to Shirky’s superb disquisition on the fate of newspapers. As much for myself, really, given that the interwebs are already not short of commentary on the subject, and to do a little close reading to draw the lessons for publishing.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

In book publishing, the Innovation Department is called Online Marketing.

Richard Eoin Nash, Mar 14, 2009

February 2009

The Future is Now

On the old Soft Skull blog I had a category called The Future is Now. And, for me, that is now true. I’m leaving Soft Skull, as described in this press release.

Thanks for everyone out there for making Soft Skull what it is, above all the readers and writers whom we exist to serve and connect, along with my colleagues, paid and unpaid (!), who’ve put in vast amounts of hours, creativity, and intensity in order to bring those writers and readers together to create this thing we call culture.

When I explained to my colleagues yesterday that I would be consulting and freelancing, some were concerned this was a euphemism for leaving publishing. It is anything but. For me, my departure is actually about my passionate belief in the future of publishing, in the future of community built around long-form edited narrative texts, in the future of connecting writers and readers, in a Web 3.0 that’s about the filters. I’m going to take this opportunity to go even deeper into publishing, to double-down, to go all in…

So bookmark/follow/RSS me. Comment all over me. Books are a conversation, always have been, we’re just a little closer to understanding how, thanks to this social activity called the web. So let’s keep talking.

Richard Eoin Nash, Feb 25, 2009

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I ran Soft Skull Press from 2001 to 2007 when we sold it to Counterpoint for whom I continued to run it until early 2009. I founded Cursor and am publisher of Red Lemonade. I now run content and community for the new cultural discoverer Small Demons. After the jump is my bio, since I know some folks come to this site looking for it, and I thwart them by not having a proper one. read more »