Sapere Aude
Tag: media
publishers and tv networks are some of those middlemen we no longer need.
Book publishers should be scared. After multiple major publishers played hardball with Amazon over the price of eBooks in the Kindle store, Amazon could very well woo away big name writers with promises of big digital sales and a huge marketing push through the Kindle. That could also translate into lower prices for books for consumers, given there will be less mouths to feed if they were to cut out the middleman.
as always, NMA has the canonical word.
this is already a few months old but has aged well. this is what journalism is all about.
Throughout 2010, I kept my own running list of exceptional nonfiction for the Best of Journalism newsletter I publish. The result is my third annual Best Of Journalism Awards – America’s only nonfiction writing prize judged entirely by me. I couldn’t read every worthy piece published last year. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention. Thanks to Byliner, a promising new site dedicated to publishing and sharing feature-length nonfiction, my annual awards dating back to 2008 are soon going to have a permanent home. I am indebted to its founder, John Tayman, for including me in an enterprise well worth checking out – and for his encouragement as I assembled this list.
debunking the crap science “reporting” by the media
Before the advent of digital reading, writers often had to choose between making their work short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the “heft” required for book marketing and distribution. 3 months ago, Amazon made a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Kindle in making a new kind of content available to readers–Kindle Singles. Typically between 5K and 30K words, each Kindle Single is intended to allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length.
the reign of the padded book because you can sell a 30 page paperback is over. yay!
the articles of note section is about the best start page for media exploration on the internet. the difference of cultured editing vs what the twitter retards would come up with.
a sort of higher brow inflight magazine
Leave it to 60 Minutes to pass off Facebook’s utterly meaningless redesign of the site’s profile pages as some kind of “exclusive” worth leading a segment on the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not just that correspondent Lesley Stahl didn’t understand what’s meaningful about his story; it’s that Zuckerberg essentially reduced the venerable newsmagazine to an unwitting shill.
a great example of the disconnect between the old guard and what is really going on in the world.
scary scary muslim scary! scary scary scary! scary buy gold scary!
well-done profile
A number of commentators had wondered whether the video’s title was manipulative. “In hindsight, should we have called it ‘Permission to Engage’ rather than ‘Collateral Murder’?. I’m still not sure.” He was annoyed by Gates’s comment on the film: “‘There is no before and no after.’ Well, at least there is now a middle, which is a vast improvement.” Then Assange leaned forward and, in a whisper, began to talk about a leak, code-named Project G, that he is developing in another secret location. He promised that it would be news, and I saw in him the same mixture of seriousness and amusement, devilishness and intensity that he had displayed in the Bunker. “If it feels a little bit like we’re amateurs, it is because we are. Everyone is an amateur in this business.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 