news from my car on the economic rollercoaster

[la_chispa]

In the past week:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt froze trade acquisitions, and the publisher, executive editor, and others in the division have resigned. The NYT quotes HMCo delicately, as "not allocating as much capital to the consumer book business

Comments

[griffjon]

McClatchy's VP also left - less print and more newspaper, but still. http://editor.blogspot.com/2008/12/turning-page_04.html

[p3rlm0nk]

Yeah, things are looking kinda dire in the newspaper industry. Alleyinsider.com (since broadened out from their origins of reporting on nyc's tech scene) pretty regularly posts things talking about how deeply screwed the sector in general and the NYT in particular is. I think partly that might be some grudge they have with us, because the metrics I have seen internally aren't quite as bad, but by the same token things aren't by any stretch of the imagination great.

[la_chispa]

Yeah, I try to keep my eyes off reports on the financial woes of the news media, now that I'm out of that part. It's all pretty harsh, though.

[griffjon]

I think traditional media in general has a pretty big attitude adjustment it has to make over the next few years to remain both relevant and respected (as it is, everyone's taking the Fox route of Oooh Shiney! to keep customers). Citizen-based media and websites in general are faster to react to current /breaking events by their nature (duh). If you're competing simply on being a new source, you're going to lose. Fox adds entertainment, and I hope more newspapers are adding exciting concepts like insight, investigation, reliability and ongoing/longterm coverage - areas where most media is sorely lacking.

/rant

[p3rlm0nk]

The Rhizome book sounds pretty neat; living close to the land and configuring a habitable environment with raw smarts is something that has fascinated me ever since I was a little kid wanting to build tree houses and reading too much little house on the prarie... of course, sadly these days being a transplant recipient, there's no escape for me from the machinations of the modern medical-industrial complex and thus needing to work to maintain health care and so on. If things got so bad that homesteading was the only practical option, looking at it from the perspective of harsh reality I would likely be deceased and my best hope would be that my loved ones were OK.

Hope you guys are staying warm and are doing well in Boston. :)

[la_chispa]

Your hopes are fulfilled on both counts. I'll fess up and say that the Rhizome book is a little too light on the "city" part, but it's still good. George Monbiot's Heat (which we also publish) is a lot stronger on the broad policy changes needed to stave off collapse.

I certainly hope to see you around for some time to come. ;)