[contextly_auto_sidebar id="2X67n54jvsskEeTyvZeL9ZzPV0yO4y6x"] JANET Fitch, a friend whose writing I admire, has written an open letter to Jeff Bezos of Amazon about what the online bookseller is doing to the literary trade and the the nation's "intellectual life." Amazon's dominance means its decisions matter, she writes: "I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young … [Read more...]
Alex Ross on the Physicality of Music
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="exXEgyg9vY0GhSt0xuo4Eqn9fO25Opza"] THE New Yorker's classical music critic is one of the least stodgy and most forward-looking of writers; he got in on blogging early and thinks classical music and digital technology are natural allies. But even he has reservations about the disappearance of records and CDs into the cloud. His new piece, about "The pleasures and … [Read more...]
David Lowery: The Internet is a Cargo Cult
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="6UAzCSm7AdyfFjCMRPoo70IpwVaaVVHl"] TODAY your humble blogger speaks to the musicians' rights advocate and gets into some new territory -- not just the way music streaming hurts artists, but the US government's complicity in the current mess, the feckless Department of Justice, and the irrational way people view the Internet in general. Here's Lowery in my Salon … [Read more...]
Journalism’s Phony Golden Age
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="v0eG90rPghAVd66MQLAYaRsKRNlqKbJ4"] IT was only, I guess, a matter of time before the digital utopians started telling us -- including laid off scribes -- how great journalism has gotten. The latest is a Wired piece, "How the Smartphone Ushered in a Golden Age of Journalism. (It's venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and not the Wired writer, who calls it a "golden … [Read more...]
The “Antifree” Movement Takes on “Free”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hMpJwAX7ROFisoxfaiwhWpOQbmzRcRS5"] BY now, we're all pretty familiar with the information-wants-to-be-free argument, and if you write for a living, or have had to endure numerous unpaid internships to break into a creative field, you know it all too well. A wide-ranging, perceptive, and slightly arch essay in the hip Brooklyn journal n+1 sketches out the … [Read more...]
Waging War on Middlebrow
A PROFOUND story appeared in the New York Times a few days ago and seems to have gotten far less discussion that it deserved. I mean film critic A.O. Scott's "The Squeeze on the Middlebrow." This is one of the best pieces I've seen connecting income inequality and the whole 1 percent business to culture and the middle class's role in it. Scott begins by speaking about Thomas Piketty's Capital … [Read more...]
The Downside of Freelance Nation
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Xdew9ZyDPnPc00sNxT9gh2myS9uRknrk"] WITH all the hype around the go-it-alone/ "free-agent" lifestyle and the new economy, it's refreshing to see a sober, well-balance piece about making a living as a freelancer. Though it's not specifically about the creative class, Tiffany Hsu's story on freelancers and the "gray economy" in California is crucial to understanding … [Read more...]
How Do Writers Make Their Living?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="7bGpqAdbG8eEXFCQfCXKxBmqMplgXX5l"] AFTER a long period in which authors and other scribes shied away from going public with their finances -- perhaps not wanting to seem like they were "in it for the money" -- the economics of the literary life have become more transparent lately. This is partly, I suspect, because of the greater concern for economics that arrived … [Read more...]
Will Amazon Crush Publishing?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="vKKFLjwmwHjYmDjG3md6BwURLIgqKbsB"] RECENTLY I've written a bit about Amazon and other giant tech companies and how they have begun to crush the world of culture, and the people who make it, while the Department of Justice and other regulatory agencies sleep. These are longstanding concerns of mine, as a journalist who writes about music and the arts, as well as the … [Read more...]
More Bad New For Authors
BOOKS and publishing seems to be coming to terms with creative destruction these days much as musicians began to a few years back. The latest batch of bad news comes from the UK, in which a survey shows that authors have lost significant financial ground over the last eight years and make, on median, about 11 pounds, below Britain's equivalent of the poverty rate. Here's The Guardian: According … [Read more...]