A Tale of Two Lit-site Redesigns: The Paris Review and NY Review of Books
by budparr on September 20, 2010
I decided to post this at Sonnet Media. Read it [here]
History Lessons
by budparr on September 18, 2010
If, like me, you sat horrified as Colin Powell so obviously lied to the world about WMDs in Iraq back in 2003, you knew there was a heavy dose of politics at work there. Making explicit what we more or less understood, Fulton Armstrong, a former U.S. Intelligence Officer, writes, in a letter to the editor of The New York Review of Books:
When we on the National Intelligence Council finally got a full read of the National Intelligence Estimate on WMDs, after its publication, a couple of us expressed grave reservations about the fatally weak evidence and the obsessively one-sided interpretation of what shreds of information it contained. (We were not told at the time that “Curveball” was a solitary source of obviously questionable credentials, nor that contradictory evidence was actually suppressed from the intelligence collection and dissemination process.) One colleague said it was clearly a paper written to provide a rationale for a predetermined policy decision to go to war. When I challenged the lack of evidence and the lack of alternative explanations, including forcing the questions raised by the INR into a lowly footnote, one of the WMD-promoting NIOs leaned forward and bellowed: “Who are you to question this paper? Even The Washington Post and The New York Times agree with us.” The irony was complete: previously respected reporters, spoon-fed by Bush administration officials, were now being used to provide cover for the NIOs’ similar compromise in accepting the administration’s view.
Thomas Powers, who wrote the article (about a book by Robert Jervis on the topic), replies, beginning:
Fulton Armstrong’s important letter states as fact something Americans have been resisting for sixty years—that presidents tell the CIA not only what to do, but what to say. By Americans I do not mean only ordinary citizens puzzling over intelligence flaps every few years, but observers thought to be sophisticated, like professors, senators of long experience, foreign policy professionals, and reporters for serious newspapers. Armstrong describes the reality about as plainly as I have ever seen it done in his letter explaining the source of error in the CIA’s insistently wrong estimate of the progress of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its purported effort to develop weapons of mass destruction.
One takeaway from this exchange (upon reading it in its entirety ) is that not much has changed in terms of the underlying problems. Whenever I begin to think I should be less cynical about politics and the media, I come across something like this. Cynicism never goes out of style.
Read the rest of the letter at The New York Review of Books.
Make it New, or At Least Know that You’re Not: The Problem with MFAs
by budparr on September 15, 2010
Having no vested interest in MFA programs or the ‘state of fiction,’ I was free to be amused by Elif Batuman’s fairly far reaching article in the London Review of Books taking Mark McGurl to task for his defense of MFA programs. The setup is this: Batufman is a PhD and McGurl is a PhD discussing what I suspect is regarded as a rather lowly space in academia – which explains why terms like “intradiegetic-homodiegetic narration” seem to me out of place. Nonetheless, the essay touches on the serious subject of the affect MFA programs have on generations of writers and what we as readers come to expect of them.
In his book The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, McGurl takes what I think is the minority position defending the MFA, saying that programme writing has produced “as rich and multifaceted a body of literary writing as has ever been.” Batufman is rightly critical of him and the programmes – admitting from the outset that she’s no fan of the writing that comes out of them – but comes off, in the beginning, amusingly pedantic by pointing out the historical precedents of this or that sort of writing that McGurl left out. She says “It might not be true that you have to ‘know the rules before you can break them’, but knowing the rules can save you from certain pitfalls, like thinking you’re being revolutionary when you aren’t.”
Her point, I think, is something that I know anecdotally to be true, that MFA students don’t read and don’t have a sense of precedent, the affect of which is stultifying. She says…
I think of myself as someone who prefers novels and stories to non-fiction; yet, for human interest, skilful storytelling, humour, and insightful reflection on the historical moment, I find the average episode of This American Life to be 99 per cent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction.
Don’t laugh that comment off, because I think there’s a lot of validity to it, though I wish she wouldn’t have brought “Reality Hunger” in the essay (if only because of exhaustion). MFA programs serve a great purpose – essentially professionalizing fiction writing – but they are not where the best writing is coming from. Yet…
McGurl has an explanation for why programme writing seems so unexciting and unspecial. It’s a weird explanation. ‘As with the disappearance of the .400 hitter in professional baseball’, so technical excellence has produced an ‘optical illusion of encroaching mediocrity: being the dominant figure in Shakespeare’s or even Pound’s time was, by comparison to today, easy as pie’. In other words, the programme era has produced so many books as good as The Red and the Black that we don’t notice them anymore.
I find this, as Batufman does, implausible, but I don’t think the answer is, as she seems to imply, only having PhD programs for literature because MFA doesn’t provide enough grounding.
At any rate, that’s just my bit, but read the whole terrific essay at LRB because there’s much more depth there. And check out Batufman’s The Possessed. I haven’t picked it up yet, but it came very highly recommended to me by someone who really ought to know.
Where We Find Music, 0.1
by budparr on August 24, 2010
The movie “Nine” is based on a play that is in turn based on the film “8 1/2.” Despite an all-star cast led by Daniel Day-Lewis and a stunningly beautiful production it manages to fall flat on its face. If one wanted a film example of “What Makes it Great” with a bastard interpretation of an earlier great work, this is it. “Nine” is a perfectly soulless film. Avoid except for medicinal purposes.
But one good thing came of an otherwise wasted evening. While searching around to see if I was the only one who loathed “Nine,” I found Roger Ebert’s review and learned this bit that I missed by not going to film school (or, whatever):
Fellini’s great films are essentially musicals. Like most Italian directors of his generation, he didn’t record live dialogue and sound. He depended on dubbing. On a set, he usually had an orchestra playing, and asked his actors to move, not in time with the music, but “in sympathy.” Everyone in a Fellini film evokes an inner body rhythm. Then there’s Rota’s music itself, my favorite soundtracks. I could watch a Fellini film on the radio.
That makes perfect sense now that I know it, and nowhere would the concept be more clear than in “8 1/2.”
Joyce to Ibsen, 1901
by budparr on June 16, 2010
James Joyce wrote to Henrik Ibsen when Joyce was nineteen years old and Ibsen in his seventies and at the end of his career. Joyce had managed to publish a review —his very first formal publication — of Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken a year earlier and, to his great surprise, Ibsen responded: “I have read or rather spelled out a review in The Fortnightly Review by Mr James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.” This began a three year correspondence between the two.
According to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, Ibsen’s response “fell upon him like a benison at the beginning of his career. He had entered the world of literature under the best auspices in that world…Before Ibsen’s letter Joyce was an Irishman; after it he was a European.”
At this time Joyce had been writing, but it was well before he published any of his own work of fiction, poetry or drama. Ibsen’s influence is clear in Portrait, yet in an earlier essay “Drama and Life” and the following letter it appears that Ibsen’s influence is as an artist as well. Understanding Joyce’s view of himself as an “artist” is critical to reading his work.
“…the artist forgoes his very self and stands a mediator in awful truth before the veiled face of God.”
Joyce translated his own words from English to Norwegian. Here is the letter:
To Henrik Ibsen
March 19018 Royal Terrace, Fairfield, Dublin
Honoured Sir: I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play, When We Dead Awaken, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English Reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in The Fortnightly Review by Mr James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held as high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy to you to have your works at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes.
What shall I say more? I have sounded your name defiantly through the college where it was either unknown of known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence — your lofty impersonal power. Your minor claims — your satire, your technique and orchestral harmony — these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper — I am not so. And when I spoke of you in debating societies and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.
But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead, how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now. Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way — though you have gone as far as you could upon it — to the end of ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ and its spiritual truth — but your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies — onward.
As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting — not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly, because you are an old man and I am a young man, not presumptuously nor sentimentally — but joyfully, with hope and with love, I give you greeting.
VQR is the Smartest Magazine on the Planet and Has Embraced the Future of Magazines
by budparr on June 10, 2010
I only started reading The Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) after they won the National Magazine Award in 2006. It’s a big fat journal, beautifully produced and smartly edited. The magazine is squarely aimed at a general audience with a wide variety of interests, including world affairs and the arts. For instance, the Spring issue this year is subtitled “Graveyard of Empires: Obama’s Afghanistan” with journalist’s accounts from the field, but also poetry by Tadeusz Rózewicz (including a terrific introduction by Ed Hirsch: “…a poet of dark refusals, hard negations”). There are also essays by Edward Falco, “An Elliptical Essay on Violence” and Michael David Lukas, “Workshopping the Next Generation of American War Literature.”
But what makes VQR really smart these days is that they have seen the future of magazines, and that future is “EPUB.” EPUB is the current standard for ebooks, or more precisely, the “format for reflowable digital books and publications.”
The current attempts by magazines to port their print editions into a glossy format for tablet computers (let’s move on and recognize that iPad is merely the first of these) is lame and misguided. Let’s face it: Zinio, the primary app for presenting digital versions of print magazines, is anemic, and won’t exist in its current form for very long. Individual apps, like Wired, with some level of interactivity and whiz bang, may work when they get that interactivity and whiz bang down, but production costs will likely favor only certain types of magazines.
Granted, at the moment the EPUB standard leaves a bit to be desired, but if you’ve never seen a hard copy of VQR, which is beautiful, you wouldn’t feel like you were missing much. And the EPUB standard is improving. It will soon bridge the gap between print and digital in the most important senses and some of the sentient qualities lost from print will be offset by the many capabilities that digital brings to the table. It’s clear that the VQR team has invested a lot of effort on design and this issue is better produced than a lot of books I’ve seen (publishers take note, please).
In announcing their decision to publish on the iPad specifically, VQR said on their blog:
It may seem a bit narrow to produce a version of the publication solely for the iPad—rather than supporting the Kindle, Nook, or Sony Reader—but it was a decision that we came to after a lot of study and consideration. It is important to us that we distribute VQR in a manner that is open, unencumbered by the limitations of digital rights management and patents. And it is important to us that the photographs in our pages be reproduced without a significant loss in quality. This leaves only e-readers that support the ePub standard, which rules out the Kindle. The Nook and the Reader have only crude black-and-white displays, leaving the iPad as the only candidate that meets our criteria. Apple is slated to release their eBooks software for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which will make our digital edition of the magazine available on any of the one hundred million portable Apple devices in use today. We hope to support more devices in the future as they embrace the ePub standard and full-color images.
…”[We've] been around for 85 years. We take the long view. The open, simple, accessible, indexable, archivable ePub format is clearly the best option for us and for our readers.”
Some of my litmag collection (click for larger)
For a reader, this is fantastic news. I’ve been a magazine addict my entire adult life, often subscribing to thirty or more publications at a time. However, keeping them creates piles and piles of paper, virtually ensuring that a good portion of them will go unread. Living digital just means one more file that I can search and store and return to as often as I like. In the future, when printing costs aren’t a factor, particularly for low-print run magazines and journals , they will be priced more affordably.
Lit journals in particular should embrace EPUB immediately. I love you all, but paying $12 for every issue of every journal packed to the gills with writers most people have never heard of has value only to the culture at large, but rarely to actual readers (as my friend Richard Nash points out “your slush-pile are your readers”). There is no greater planned obsolescence than a lit journal, yet there has never been a more opportune time to bring literature and ideas into the greater cultural conversation. Web sites are great, but leave out the immersive qualities that ebooks promise for reading things that require sustained attention. VQR’s Spring edition is priced at $3.99, which seems more than fair to me given its 305 pages of content and its print subscription (for four issues) of $32 per year. If you are one of the millions with an iPad—a new one gets sold every three seconds, they say— buy a copy of VQR. You won’t be sorry.
addendum: Kevin Smokler points out on Twitter that the (excellent and forward thinking) journal Electric Literature has already published in EPUB, a fact I should have known because I mentioned them some time ago when they published an iPhone app. The 2nd issue has Lydia Davis and Colson Whitehead, among others, the current issue includes Aimee Bender. Buy that too!
p.s. point to explore: How will subscription models work in EPUB?
How Good Design Can Lead us to Freedom: On iPad Apps vs the Web, and Free
by budparr on June 1, 2010
A lot of smart people are commenting about newspaper and magazine iPad apps as though the apps’ features are set in stone. There’s no reason for there not to be links within an app, for instance, and there’s no reason to think that the developers are ignorant of that fact. Yet, I’ve seen complaints about the lack of links and other fairly trivial aspects of iPad apps from several, usually more perspicacious, sources. While conceding that some publisher’s misguided belief they’ve “rethought” the magazine are so far off the mark, we should be looking at apps in context of readers, journalism, and the Web. Considering that apps are in their early stages of development vis-á-vis the browser’s relatively long history, news apps have got a leap ahead of Web sites in reader-experience terms alone.
The New York Times and Financial Times are two instances of serious content apps that are not necessarily feature-rich now but have a business imperative to evolve, and the USA Today and Entertainment Weekly apps are leading the way in design. They show great promise on the road to the newspaper becoming merely “the news.” I find myself gravitating to the comparably simpler FT and Times apps on my iPad, despite their lack of features, instead of the Web and certainly opposed to consuming content on my laptop, and I think in time others will too.
The apps’ point of value will arrive when they bring the most powerful features of the Web — personalized browsing, sharing, linking — with a reading experience that the Web clearly lacks. It’s easy to see, looking at the screenshots below, how the app clearly gives us a better reading experience (though, as I’ve mentioned before, app design will spill over into better Web design too):
These are screenshots of the same article taken at the same time. The one on the left is from The New York Times on the Web via iPad’s Safari. The other is via The New York Times iPad app (n.b. the video embedded in the lower right.).
There’s no contest. The app is a better user experience, despite the — arguable — fact that The New York Times Web site is one of the better designed news sites out there.
With the app you can effortlessly turn the page (less effortlessly than turning the actual paper and without the time drag and disorientation of loading the next page of a Website), share the article (for the moment limited to email), watch a video, and return to the home screen. That’s it. The isolation and lack of options is a benefit to readers.
There is an easy to distinguish difference in the amount of noise on the page (this is why readers in the know gravitate to Instapaper and Readability – both lacking many of the “features” you’d find on Web sites).
The Web Style Guide points out a fundamental shortcoming of the Web (and one we designers are faced to deal with daily):
Text on the computer screen is hard to read not only because of the low resolution of computer screens but also because the layout of most Web pages violates a fundamental rule of book and magazine typography: the lines of text on most Web pages are far too long for easy reading. Magazine and book columns are narrow for physiological reasons: at normal reading distances the eye’s span of acute focus is only about three inches wide, so designers try to keep dense passages of text in columns not much wider than that comfortable eye span. Wider lines of text require readers to move their heads slightly or strain their eye muscles to track over the long lines of text. Readability suffers because on the long trip back to the left margin the reader may lose track of the next line.
While the Times’ app’s columns are meant to mimic print newspapers (a concept the WSJ app took way too far) rather than strike a balance of line length for good readability, the column widths here work well in the fixed space of the iPad’s screen and are far more readable than what we are presented with on Web sites. The Times’ International Herald Tribune, before it was folded into their global offerings, displayed articles in columnar format, so it is possible (though, I’ve tried and it’s difficult to pull off in a dynamic setting) to do that on the Web, but instead we are left with virtually a Web-wide one-size-fits-all text dump.
USA Today’s app has a very clean interface and is easy to use and read. Despite a few issues begging for standard practices for app design, even in these early stages, the app is superior to both the Web site and to print:
I think — and the big publishers are betting — that people will pay for that enhanced experience when it’s backed with good journalism. Jacob Weisberg calls it “pretty;” I call it good design.
There are three-quarters of a million people who still subscribe to The Times, which is not cheap, despite the free version on the Web. Politico, a profitable political news Web site, still maintains its print base. While there are lots of factors driving the legacy of print subscriptions, as tablets and readers improve and proliferate and the overall quality improves, print magazines and newspapers will have little reason to exist in their print form beyond sentimental reasons and we all know sentiment doesn’t pay the bills. While business models will certainly evolve, it’s erroneous to think that the business of journalism will merely cease to exist (that is, no one will pay for it) because there are free alternatives.
I’m as uncomfortable as anyone with the “walled garden” being imposed upon the Web in the name of consumerism. The iPad is a harbinger of the end of geekdom, or a new kind of geek. Lets face it, the Open Source era of the Web is not as free and open as it used to be. Everything is monetized; “free” is just another word for indirect monetization or the price of gaining marketshare. But free shouldn’t be a feature, particularly if the implicit costs are high. Think how earlier generations were duped into thinking that beef should be close to free. Now we’re finding that the cost of all that cheap beef is that it’s killing us, not to mention the destruction of our natural resources and the treatment of animals in factory farms.
One tech venture capitalist (whose name Newsweek seems to have lost) points out the irony of paying for print as though we are all aware that the physical object is somehow worth more than the information it contains:
When I buy the dead-tree version of my local newspaper, I have no expectation that it should be free. If I pick it up and walk out of the coffee shop without paying, that’s stealing. But when I walk upstairs to my office and log on to the Web site for the same paper, I feel a divine right to access the entirety of that paper—and 10 years of its archives—for free.
Just as we have allowed our listening experience to be cheapened by the convenience of mp3s, we’ve allowed our reading experience to be cheapened by the freedom of the Web (this spoken, mind you, from a Web designer and avid blogger approaching his eighth year). Among other things (and granted, this isn’t just a Web problem), the prospect of the “news” being driven more by political-backed bias machines rather than objective journalism leaves me with an uneasy feeling. There is a democratic imperative to pay for serious journalism, where, as Bill Keller says (in reply to Michael Massing’s interesting pieces in The New York Review of Books on news and the internet) to “go places, bear witness, develop sources, dig, and explain, and trust readers to draw their own conclusions.”
While it may sound trivial to say that design — much less the design of iPad apps — can lead us out of the mess that the field of journalism finds itself in, it is a critical first step on the road to a new media business model. Richard Lanham writes in his seminal book, The Economics of Attention:
The most obvious new group of attention economists may be the computer-human interface designers. This branch of information design subsumes all the efforts at Web site design, amateur and professional, which we encounter on our daily voyage through cyberspace. The Internet constitutes the pure case of an attention economy. “Eyeballs” constitute the coin of the realm….the economics that matters in this new theater, is design.
#FridayReads – Incantation by Laughter and The Thing Around Your Neck
by budparr on May 21, 2010
We had a little party the other night to celebrate the release of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. Twenty or so people gathered in a beautiful Manhattan apartment with the treat of having the renowned poet, and president of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Edward Hirsch read to us from the anthology. It’s a massive collection so to pick a couple of poems to represent the whole is difficult, but Hirsch picked one that I think actually represents the challenges of poetry and translation. The poem is Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Incantation by Laughter” in which Khlebnikov riffs, in Russian, on the various ways to express laughter in his language. Paul Schmidt did a fantastic job of creating something that I have to imagine recreates the original while creating something wholly new. Here are the first five lines:
Hlahla! Uthlofan, lauflings!
Hlahla! Uflofan, lauflings!
Who lawghen with lafe, who hlaegen lewchly,
Hlahla! Uflofan hlouly!
Hlahla! Hloufish lauflings lafe uf beloght lauchalorum!
You might like to see Edward Hirsch’s Big Think video
I’ve also been reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stories collected in The Thing Around Your Neck. This book will be passed around from English and writing teachers to students for years to come. Her stories are flawless. Perhaps even a bit too good. Emotionally distant. Though that may be unfair to say just yet. Here’s a video of her TED talk: Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story
#FridayReads is a twitter phenomenon where people share what they’re reading. It’s a fun exercise, but 140 characters doesn’t seem enough…
Do Tools Matter? On Collaborative Writing
by budparr on May 17, 2010
Matt Bell is a terrific writer and an exemplar of ‘born digital.’ If you follow writing circles online you will find Matt. That’s one reason -two, actually – I’m watching his online writing exercise this week at “Everday Genius,” the online journal of the chapbook publisher Publishing Genius.
Matt’s week at “Everyday Genius” will begin with him starting a story on Monday, seeded from his “failure files” (his writing block isn’t so much as an ability to write, but an inability to write something he feels worthwhile to publish, he explains), then turning it over to two different authors over the course of the week, then over to the community at large, and then back to Matt on Friday to revise before they publish the final story on the site.
I like this exercise because it gives the author some level of control while mimicking not just collaborative writing, but the editorial process to a degree. At the very least it takes the writer out of his vacuum while leaving him in control of the final product.
Collaborative writing has been around for a long time. I have several books of not-bad attempts at it. Penguin UK (a leader among publishers in terms of their online work) recently attempted and failed a massive collaborative writing exercise, using a Wiki. Truthfully, it was too massive and showman-like to produce anything good, but perhaps served its purpose in the iterative sense of moving forward with possibilities. Ultimately though, too many cooks in the pot at the least, and I think that the exercise demonstrated that a wiki is not a place for “writing” so much as a place for “documenting.”
What’s interesting about “Everyday Genius’s” project is that it puts a lone writer on the line. This is brave because creative writing at its best comes from deep places within, yet the form Matt is doing this in is something akin to an art installation where the artist lives in a glass booth baring all to the world around him.
Here’s where the tools come in to play. Matt will be writing his story, along with his collaborators, on software called “EtherPad” (I’m not sure if they’ll be using their own installation of Etherpad, which went Opensource when Google bought the company who created it last year, but there’s an installation of it called “MeetingWords” available freely online).
The beauty of Etherpad is that it truly is real-time and it’s very easy to see who is doing what to the text. I’ve used it before to edit articles at “Dispatches” at Words Without Borders (as well its decidedly less real-time brethren, Writeboard). Writing on Etherpad is fun to watch, if a little eerie at first, as another person’s writing appears before your eyes. The software has a chat function where writers can talk about what they’re writing. Obviously there are implications here for all sorts of uses (n.b. Google Wave).
But what I think is really interesting – taking it back down to earth with “Everyday Genius’s” purpose – is how it affects one’s writing in a creative or critical sense. Is it possible that this can make for better writing? I know that from my perspective as an editor working with a writer it was incredibly productive.
One of the things I’ve been a student of over the past seven years of building Websites is watching how people interact with technology: how technology influences what they write; for instance, the difference between articles, blog posts, micro-blog posts, as an enabler or hindrance to certain types of writing. It’s plain to see that a piece written outside of the Web entirely (e.g. on MS Word, ugh) may be entirely different than one written in the control panel of a content management system or a bookmarklet popup. That might be due to technological noise – the inhibiting feel of a text-editor – but I think there’s a time factor at play as well.
As an aside of sorts, I often have to communicate to my Web design clients my design conceptions for their site. In the past I typically created a static mockup of the site and sent it to the client via email. Sometimes my design ideas don’t jive with the client’s expectations or there’s some element that I want the client to react to without me prompting them with expectations. This rarely works out well or smoothly, but I found that the more time that went by between when I sent the mockup to our discussion of it, the issues were always amplified to the same degree.
Lately I’ve begun to only reveal the design with the client when I have them on the phone, reviewing the designs then and there and making small changes as part of our conversation and instantly putting those changes up for them to see. What before seemed monumental tends to evaporate into just part of the discussion, even if the result is a bit less polished than it might have been the old way.
Writing sometimes loses its way. That’s why we have editors. But as any writer knows, it hurts quite a bit to see your words changed for you. I think shortening the distance between writer and editor, or writer and collaborator may stand to improve writing in general and the possibility of a form of writing that never has been able to get out of the gate. “Everyday Genius’s” exercise, along with sites like BookOven may go along way to getting us there.
Links:
Matt Bell, Everyday Genius, Matt’s first post on the writing project, The Writing Project (it is at MeetingWords).
BookOven (whom I’ll be writing about soon), The Penguin UK Blog, EtherPad landing page
What Web Media Can Learn from Print
by budparr on May 13, 2010
With the death throes of Newsweek there are a lot of Web publishers wallowing in schadenfreude as the scales are tipping in their direction. What Newsweek has shown is that there’s more to being successful on the Web than being there and even a shift from a weekly print mag to a daily news mag with a “best of” print edition will likely fail too.
Yet, at the same time I see Web media publishers scoff at print media attempts to monetize with pay-walls and dedicated apps, and even readers are up in arms at the prospect of paying for something they’ve gotten used to getting for free.
Firstly, the comments I’ve seen about, for instance, the New York Times’ iPad app, assume that this is a static phenomenon when the fact is that these apps can and will improve quickly and soon will be feature rich and create an incomparable user experience that readers will pay for.
The Web is great, but needs to improve as print readers complete the shift to online. I suspect that there will be a convergence of usability between dedicated apps and Websites, but just as print was slow to get the picture about the web, the web is slow to create a good reading experience.
When you hear someone say they like “holding” a paper in their hands what they really mean is that reading online sucks. It doesn’t have to be that way. The most popular news sites on the Web look horrible and do little to promote actual reading. It amazes me that when pundits talk about the fact that people skim instead of read online that they assume that that can’t change; that it’s a function of being online, when the fact is that the more closed in experience of reading an app or using Instapaper or Readability demonstrate that there can be a better experience – and that’s not even taking into account the difference between reading these articles on a consumption oriented device, such as an iPad and other innovations we’ve yet to see.
What apps and pay walls do for publishers is segment an audience who want a dedicated, high quality reading experience. Readers who pay three or four hundred dollars a year to subscribe to the print edition of the New York Times are probably not subscribing to a lot of other papers, despite the fact that there have always been hundreds to choose from. We’ve grown accustomed to thinking about content but don’t underestimate the value of convenience and experience. Even if the subscription base has eroded for these companies, there are still millions of dollars of subscriptions out there that need to go somewhere. I’m not saying that revenue/pay issues will be easy to solve or work themselves out in a year, but I do believe that as print disappears the economics will change, the dollars will shift and it’s not safe to say content wants to be free.
That brings us to the Web. As long as Web publishers don’t address the lower quality experience readers get today, their readers will not be loyal (yes, there will be exceptions, particularly the more blog-like publications).
This change needs to come from Editorial and Design. Design can learn from the greater experience, though still in its infancy, of iPad apps and think beyond what’s here and now. For example there are a handful of designers who are publicly musing how to design articles on the Web on a per-article basis, fitting the design to the subject of the article. It’s shouldn’t be inconceivable that we turn those ideas into a reality.
Editorial can learn by treating copy as though it will be on the shelf forever, which it will, and differentiating between blog posts and articles. A recent CJR study showed that magazine publishers do less copy editing on the web and I suspect that there is a technological gap to blame as well as a lack of importance assigned to Web copy. We’ve yet to develop processes for online publishing that work because editorial is forced to be far more technical than in the past.
As print disappears the window of opportunity for born digital publishers will narrow. They’ve been able to find their audience to date – and to be sure, there will always be some segment that will read these creations – but the death of Newsweek isn’t a time for celebration, it’s a time to realize that the shift from print to Web is really happening and competition for eyeballs will become even more intense and we need to think hard about not merely replicating the print experience online, but improving it so that there is nothing lost when the shift ultimately happens.