My sixth grade teacher, Mrs Lyons, seemed to be stuck in some mysterious past. We were convinced she missed the friends she’d grown up with, including her best friend, T-rex himself. She called her students "Master" and "Miss."
"Miss Bacon, the capital of Arizona, please. Master Montgomery! Put that down now!"
She made us stand beside our desks to "recite" the answers we were called upon to deliver, and she constantly confused us with her insistence that next year, we would be starting "prep school."
She also was steadfast in her refusal to use artificial chalk. She said it was worthless, and she carefully hoarded her supply of "Genuine Chalk," whose boxes sported drawings of tiny shellfish.
Mrs Lyons is long gone, along with her trilobites, but the funny thing is that the chalkboards themselves have largely followed her into oblivion. I have six children, the youngest of whom are now in high school, and I have been required to sit through countless parent-teacher conferences in scores of classrooms. At least ninety percent of those classrooms had no chalkboard in sight. The whiteboard reigned for years, but now even that is being retired, replaced with flat-screen interactive computer displays that run on pure smoke and dark magic. Mrs Lyons would shudder in revulsion.
Newspapers across the country are going broke, closing their doors or switching to online versions only. There is nothing a newspaper can deliver to your doorstep that the internet can’t get there faster and cheaper.
Chalkboards, whiteboards, and newspapers are all technologies whose days as dissemination channels are numbered. If you want to be paid for something, you have to provide goods, services, or activities. You have to provide value, and there is no value obsolete technologies can offer in an attempt to fight off newer, better technologies.
As electronic distribution of information trumps physical means, the physical means will cease to function. As epublishing and POD continue to do end runs around the lonely gates of the publishing industry, gates which stand like monuments to the fallen walls, the old-school model of corporate publishing will follow those long-dead trilobites to their inevitable end.
I intend to be in the forefront of the invading hordes.
Posted in response to the contest at Backword Books.
Related posts:
- More Thoughts on the Status of Self-Publishing
- Photographers, Musicians, and Authors – Further Thoughts on Self-Publishing
- Misconceptions About Self-Publishing — Part I
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Great post! Note two typos in 2nd to last paragraph.
Todd Rutherford´s last blog ..Developing A Fictional Character
Well, that’s embarrassing! In my (meager) defense, I wrote this post on my BlackBerry Storm, and I added that sentence late in the game. Anyway, they’re fixed now.
Thank you!
While I agree that most of the major newspapers are heading for oblivion, it is mainly because they have not been listening to their readers. Look at what readers said when the San Jose MercNews admitted it had problems:
http://forums.mercurynews.com/topic/cassidy-its-time-for-a-frank-talk-with-readers-about-mercury-news?source=article#comment-286529 or http://bit.ly/1Ot4x3
Many communities are starting community newspapers which serve their needs. Often they are entirely voluntary, and sometimes just photocopied, but almost universally they have one thing in common — despite being run in conjunction with some often very good web sites, they are on paper.
Our first info on major news will come via radio, tv and the internet, perhaps via sites like the new Google fast flip at http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ (though there’s much to do both by Google and the sites they point to).
Newspapers will be here in the future but they will not be today’s monoliths. We may actually get the so-called community press back to the community.
What does remain a problem is that most local publications will sooner or later want to include information from around the nation or around the world, and the big boys’ ownership of the news agencies and restrictions on reprinting except by themselves that there seem great problems in ensuring that the original writers of stories will receive anything. And I’d guess that will gbe especially important to people such as you (and me).
Gordon Woolf´s last blog ..Does punctuation matter?
I agree that there will be newspapers in the future, just as there will be publishers in the future. But neither the publishers nor the newspapers will be anything like what we have today. In order to make enough money to survive, they will have to provide a value to their customers. They will have to provide a value that cannot be obtained by the faster, cheaper, more interactive and nimble models offered by electronic transfer of information.
I don’t pretend to know what direction the newspapers will have to look to find that value, but the publishers of the future will find themselves hard put to compete against increasingly competent self-publishing models. In order to compete, they will have to begin seeing authors as clients to be served, and not as a resource to be exploited.
Levi