Diary of a Mad Editor

In the last month several more newspapers have decided to stop their presses, the latest being, the Tuscon Citizen, one of the oldest remaining newspapers in the country, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  Why bother maintaining a few newsroom of paid, trained professional journalists when any amateur “citizen journalist” off the street armed with an sd card and a digital camera can run the same stories on a blog on the cheap? Is it any wonder why newspapers and magazines are failing?

And I cannot tell you how many stories I’ve read about the “Death of the Book,” this past year.  When you have publishers charging hardcover prices for ebooks and continuing to hand-out multimillion dollar advances to celebrities  based solely on the presumed value of their names is it any wonder publishing firms are in trouble?  The book, if it is truly dying, it’s not dying a natural death.  One can only attribute so much blame to the Amazon Kindle for demise of traditional publishing. After all, ebooks — despite the hype, only account for a small fraction of the book market. 

I think the real problem is that publishers have forgotten the readers in the equation. They’ve forgotten what we need and want from a reading experience.  So, they try to tell us what to want.  They cut corners and don’t even try to give us what we want.  Newspapers decide to cut costs by getting rid of their best writers and eliminating publishing space so they can squeeze in a few more adds.  And despite their best efforts to prop up their bottom line, they are losing subscribers left and right.  Why? Because the Internet is giving them what they want for free.  Why pay for something that doesn’t deliver the goods? 

Book publishers have forgotten to publish books that matter.  Publishing houses used to invest in new writers, cultivating their careers on the merits of their talents. Now, publishers build brand names. The problem with that is that brands don’t always derive their authority from merit. In an age when anyone came become famous for nothing at all and build a brand based on nothing at all, you cannot trust brand names.   It’s no longer about the books or the readers.  Books are just products.  Readers just consumers and consumers are stupid malleable creatures, right?.  Somewhere out there, is the next great American writer — but he’s not even bothering with the publishing houses because it’s a closed shop to him. He’s tried that and found it wanting. Maybe he isn’t the great American writer he thinks he is. Mayb he is but didn’t write the most commercially viable story. And maybe he is all that and a bag of chips and he had every door slammed into his face anyway — it happens more often than not. So, while big publishers are blowing their wads on multimillion dollar deals for celebrities and their franchise writers, the next great American novelist is going to smaller, leaner, hungrier, publishing firms, publishing on blogs, in POD, on mobireader and the Kindle.  He may never get a foothold in the market, but he’s doing his best and doing it his way.  Meanwhile the big publishers are losing money because they’ve forgotten that books are a people-to-people business.  Books are of and for the people.  Books are humanity itself.  And so traditional publishing is dying and the body is starting to rot and fester and stink.  And the new media will not save them because new technology doesn’t change the fundamentals of the game.  It’s still about finding good writers, cultivating, marketing and distributing their books to passionate, engaged readers at a reasonable price.  Big Publishing forgot that a long time ago.