Mariah Jovan and David Nygren interview Sarah Wendell about writers and money.
Twitter is the new fad amongst everyone and their cousin including John Mayer. Apparently as a result of John Mayer spending too much time twittering, Jennifer Aniston is moving on. (shameless gossip piece tangentially related to writing and publishing because the twitterati is the subject of a new RWR piece).
Steve Johnson, an author, and starter of things related to the internet (as everyone on the internet is) and apparently a SOMEONE because Andrew Sullivan linked to him, has found the Kindle koolaid and thinks it might be the savior of newspapers. (ha ha ha, I laugh). Via Andrew Sullivan.
Speaking of the news not making any money even with the Kindle, a billionaire wants to turn newspapers into not for profit corporations. Gee, will my subscription be tax deductible then? Can I endow the Jane Litte editorial space for snarkiness and mean girliness?
Oo, oo! Sign me up for the “Jane Litte editorial space for snarkiness and mean girliness”! I will totally contribute to that fund-raising effort!
I’m really feeling my age.
Women are leaving men because of their twittering? hmmmmmm….
Dan Kennedy, writing in the UK’s Guardian, which is itself owned by a “non-profit trust,” has what I thought was an interesting piece on how this might work in the US given that for a non-profit newspaper
He suggests that perhaps it’s time to look into the restrictions on the freedom of speech which are tied to tax exemptions. Another possibility he mentions is for the papers to be run as for-profit organisations, owned by non-profit organisations.
As someone who works at a newspaper, I think something like that will have to be done to keep the industry in business.
People say they won’t miss newspapers, but there’s just no other source for some of the things we do — especially when it comes to covering things like local school board meetings or county commission meetings. All the things that involve where people’s tax dollars go, where they send their kids to school, etc. And obits. People love their obits.
No magazine is going to cover local communities like that, and the 60-second story on your local news doesn’t give you nearly as much info as a newspaper story would. It makes me kind of sad how the industry is circling the drain …
I had posted my late wife’s novel Cowboy on twitter over six months and 3500 tweets. She would have loved the idea of posting this way. In particular, the idea of writing a story at starts at the end. It can be seen at http://www.twitter.com/talkingcat I needed to show the forward reading version at http://www.pick2prod.com I believe that it was the first novel on twitter to be completely posted, started in May, 2008