Well, I ain’t at SXSW, but damn, a man can’t just give that sort of excuse when the time comes to look at the changes in the news business and highlight how one might view current issues in publishing in that light. Clary Skirky, already in progress, and now Steven Johnson. Batch one of reactions.

Let me say one final thing. I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell.

I’ll discuss that anon.

But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown — and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves — has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two.

Well, it’s less the specifically financial meltdown and more the economic meltdown that resulted in advertising revenues that fell far faster than they would otherwise have. But yup, that’s basically right, though a bit overly generous to the companies that owned the news media, I think.

That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work.

I expect most folks reading this personally know people in both the news and in book publishing who are those very people.

But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.

The kicker. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing happening in the book business. Yet another world is possible.

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Over the weekend, I’m responding to Shirky’s superb disquisition on the fate of newspapers. As much for myself, really, given that the interwebs are already not short of commentary on the subject, and to do a little close reading to draw the lessons for publishing.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

In book publishing, the Innovation Department is called Online Marketing.

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There’s an excellent interview at The Scowl with Jonathan Messinger (see, pun, not typo, and stolen from the name of his blog), known to some as the Books Editor of Time Out Chicago and to others as the co-publisher of Featherproof Books an operation which, alongside Underland Press and Two Dollar Radio, will make my decision to leave Soft Skull look like I was just trying to get out before the cool new folks obliterated me.

Some useful points to chew over, including their subscription series, and their mash-up promotion, both activities you know I’ve been advocating lo these many years (OK, well, 2 years and 4-5 years respectively…) and at which they arrived, as have so many others, utterly independent of any of my beseechings, but I’d draw attention to his discussion of the third of my bugaboos, the pointless zero sum game approach to format:

What it always devolves to is one person clinging to what they’ve grown up with and accustomed to–the printed book, this classic, vaunted, untouchable commodity–and self-appointed visionaries who see digital distro as the obvious wave of the future, plowing down the fogies and fuddy-duddies.

If we de-politicize it, it becomes a much more open, interesting discussion. My feeling is that both media offer something that the other doesn’t. So why should one replace the other? What does digital do best? It readily reaches a much broader audience, costs significantly less money, has multimedia capacity. But print does some things better, too: trades in immediacy for longevity, has a tactile, textured component that digital hasn’t been able to replicate. There’s also a great single-mindedness about print that I enjoy. So I don’t worry so much whether print will “die” or “survive,” I’d rather just think about how best to use print creatively””what can it do that nothing else can, what are its limits and how do we test them?

But mostly, I’m interested in how digital and print can interact. That’s why we started our Featherproof Remix series, which releases part of a new book, and invites writers to rewrite and rearrange it. We then publish the best submissions as an ebook, a few weeks before the print book hits bookstores (and, of course, our books are available as ebooks). I guess what I mean is that both are great, and interactivity is much more interesting to me than exclusivity.

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Unlike a regular cocktail party, book launches provide a portable, thick but light flat surface on which to put down your plate allowing you greater mobility to navigate the room and rub elbows with the other attendees. This presumes you have bought the book being launched.

(Via @drmabuse)

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A couple of weeks before I left, I got the most gorgeous email from one of my authors (yes, I’ve left, but first person possessive doesn’t exclude her from being someone else’s author either, OK, like Seal, and City Lights, and Suspect Thoughts who’ve all published her, and whoever replaces me…), Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, an Utne Visionary and editor of That’s Revolting, a book we published in 2004, and reissued last year. I knew I wanted to keep it till my own blog was ready so I could post it here, and herewith:

You know when you have a friend who you think will always be there — no matter what, at least you’ll have that friendship, right? Lostmissing is a public art project about the loss of that relationship, a specific relationship for me–right now it’s missing. I want to express myself in public space in a way that feels personal and more meaningful than a private expression because I want to connect to other people and other lostmissing stories. This project is a public expression of grief in order to feel hopeful again–it’s about that random poster you see and you don’t know what it means but your eyes get bright all the sudden.

I will be putting these posters up everywhere I can think of, and posting photos of the posters in public space, and even making new posters out of those photos and then posting photos of those new posters too. And I’m giving the posters out to people to put them up in their own towns and kitchens and living rooms and bathrooms and galleries and meeting spaces and community centers and bars and workplaces and on the street and on abandoned buildings in bus shelters and on public transportation at shows of all kinds and on bulletin boards and in store windows and in letters and in taxis and on the internet and near dramatic views and tourist attractions and in your own art and wherever else you can think of. I want to make this expression of sadness and anger into something collective, and I want people to add their own lostmissing stories to the posters if they want to, and then I want people to send revised posters or photos of posters in public or private spaces, affixed in any way you find appropriate, and then I’ll post it all on my blog and maybe make a zine or a handmade book or some form of documentation that puts it all together. What do you think?

Feel free to click the images on my blog as I post them, and print out the JPEG and post everywhere. I can also send you hard copies of the posters as I make them, or a PDF of each poster as it arrives — just let me know, and I’ll make sure to send them your way! You can leave me a message here, or feel free to email or call or write — all my info is here….

Yay — I’m so excited!

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Can’t help myself from posting the new Fall 2009 catalog from Soft Skull/Counterpoint. Email the publicity interns for review copies of anything that grabs your eye…

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