Beatrice Author Interviews

I came across an archive of author interviews by Ron Hogan, who writes the Beatrice literary blog. Ron’s blog was listed on Norman Jenson’s Onegoodmove blog, which has a host of good literary links. Norm has been kind enough to list this blog as well (thanks, Norm), and he seems to be a chess aficionado to boot (which earns him a good mark in my book).

Chinaman’s Chance

For those wondering what the official Chinese position is on the decline of the U.S. dollar, SimonWorld points to a Q&A that appeared in The People’s Daily. He also quotes Brad de Long’s calculation that "China is spending about $40 billion a year–2.5% of GDP–on its currency-support program." The U.S. dollar fell today despite comments from President George Bush and Treasury Secretary John Snow that they back reducing the deficits and supporting a strong U.S. currency.

Citizen Journalism, OhMy

Korea’s OhmyNews recently interviewed Dan Gillmor, blogger and author of We the Media, about his decision to leave the San Jose Mercury News to start a citizen journalism project. (OhmyNews, an online participatory newspaper, was recently profiled in Asia Times.) Among the highlights of the interview with Gillmor:

Your comparison of journalism-as-a-lecture model vs. journalism-as-conversation is fascinating. How would you like to implement this in your new media startup?

What I’ve been doing personally on the blog for some time now has been all about that. The only way you can have a conversation is if you listen. That’s the first rule of conversation. And I’ve had a wonderful time listening, even when they attack me (laughter). I typically learn more from those who think I’m wrong than from people who think I’m right. Especially when they tell me why I’m wrong.

And then once you learn how to listen — which is something journalists need to do better — then we can then say that with the tools being created — things like what OhmyNews is doing — then we can say "Don’t just respond to us but let’s all talk together" and "Let’s develop ways of taking that publication of a story and broadcast and make that the beginning of something."

There is a fear that people are only turning to the news they like and that on the Internet there is a balkanization of news. Do you think that the massively distributed model like OhmyNews can solve this problem?

As I said, I am worried about this "echo chamber" where we only listen to what we want to. It’s so important for people to expose themselves to things that are different. One of the things that I think is valuable about a newspaper is to be exposed to things you didn’t know you cared about, especially if it covers a broad range of issues.

But the tools are coming along that help people find other things. And I think that even a site or publication or whatever medium we’re going to use, that even when it has a stance or political worldview, part of the fairness is in saying "If you disagree, we’re going to make sure that your response is going to be prominently displayed near the original." And I think that covers what we need to do as well, as journalists, listening to the other side and giving displays for the opposing views.

I caught mention of this interview on Joi Ito‘s blog.

Stories from Magnum Photos

The Christian Science Monitor’s photo editor Tom Toth reviews a new book about the legendary Magnum Photos:

There’s a great story here – actually 61 stories.
Boot has structured a book that is fresh, inviting, and provocative.
Here’s how it works. Sixty-one Magnum photographers are each
represented by one photo story laid out over six pages. Each
photographer explains his or her thought process on the story in an
accompanying essay.

From Blog to Book

Joshua Kurlantzick talks about how blogs are impacting the marketing and publishing of new books in his article for the NYT "A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books)."

During the last year many Web logs, or blogs, have focused on the war in Iraq and the presidential campaign, and as these blogs gained a wider audience some publishers started paying attention to them. Sometimes publishers are interested in publishing elements of the blogs in book form; mostly they simply enjoy the blogger’s writing and want to publish a novel or nonfiction book by the blogger, usually on a topic unrelated to the blog. […] All this has begun to stimulate even more interest among editors and agents. For instance, Kate Lee, an assistant at International Creative Management talent agency in New York, has become a kind of one-woman blog boutique, surfing for the best writers online and suggesting they work with her to develop and sell a book.

Lee was mentioned in The New Yorker‘s Talk of the Town in May.

“Most writers are not getting published in magazines or literary journals,” Lee said the other day, clicking through her Internet Explorer favorites in her cluttered cubicle at the I.C.M. office on West Fifty-seventh Street. “For some more unconventional voices, for people that don’t have connections, blogs can be an entryway into the game.”

Gawker got some mileage out of the mini-trend back then.

It’s the most retarded shell game on earth — and the most technophobic, ass-backwards, financially-dumb-headed industry in the world. Our prediction: first blogger book: $140K advance. Second blogger book: $700K advance. Third blogger book: $15K advance. None earn out, the shark gets jumped, and then it’s contract publishing gigs for all, and some God-awful ghost-writing gigs, which results in yet more bitter alcoholic blather on weblogs.

(GameChanger gently chides me for quoting from The New York Times, but, yes, my hometown newspaper is part of my regular reading. Thanks, GC, for mentioning this blog.)

фото

Knowing that I have been looking at photo hosting sites, photographer Alexei Kondrachov has kindly mentioned Russian-language Photosight. I cannot read the descriptions, but the photography looks great. Those of you who share my interest in photojournalism should check out this part of the site. (Thanks, Alexei.)

Digital Library Expanded

The New York Times has reported that the Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands are planning on making one million books publicly available over the Internet. Search engine Google has inked agreements with several of the nation’s "leading research universities" in which it will publish and make searchable the full text of library books whose copyright has expired. John Battelle wonders how Google is going to monetize this effort.

A very interesting case will be Google Print. As that program
expands, and it’s rumored that it will, dramatically, a number of
questions arise. How will Google monetize out-of-copyright books? If it
indeed does bring tens of thousands of out-of-print books onto the web
and into its index, will it allow others to access and index that new
treasure trove, or will it act more like a traditional media company,
which would "own" that resource for itself? How will it choose what it
brings into the index – those that might sell? Those that somehow are
the most "in demand" by some measurable standard? With regard to books
that are in print, will it limit itself to being soley an
organizational tool supported by AdWords, or will it start to take a
vig for books that are sold via the Google Print service (in fact,
maybe it does already and I’m simply unaware of it – any publishers out
there, let me know!)? And will the print model scale to television and
movies or music?

Who Asks?

Military blogger Fred Schoeneman weighs in on the controversy that was stirred when Army Spc. Thomas Wilson asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld why there were not more armored humvees in Iraq. Wilson was prodded to ask the question by a Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter.

In many armies in this world, a soldier wouldn’t survive asking such
a question. But we aren’t talking about a foreign army, we’re talking
about the American Army, which is full of volunteers — National
Guardsmen and Reservists — who’ve put their lives on hold to serve
their country […]. Many of these enlisted men have already served back to
back deployments, and many more will be asked to serve back to back
deployments in the future. The least these men can expect is not to be
condescended to. Seriously:  Coached or not, that soldier had every right to ask his question. 

Like it or not, get used to it. Media continues to get less objective, not more so. The line between media, participant and consumer continues to get ever more blurred in a phenomenon that others call "citizen journalism." Protests are covered by protestors, and war is now covered partly by soldiers, as the photos from Abu Ghraib showed. Historians like Stephen Ambrose used to look at first-person accounts largely after the war was over: through letters that were written home and the accounts written by troopers often long after the last shot was fired.  These days, camera phones, email and blogs give new meaning to the word "first-person journalism."

Rina Kond

Walking past the Metropolitan Museum yesterday, I met film student and
photographer Alexei Kondrachov, who was selling watercolors for his mom
Rina Kond. Rina draws and paints
wonderfully amusing animal figures.  On Rina’s web site, Alexei reports
that the walls of his bedroom were covered with the pictures, because she wanted him to grow up to be a "kind and happy boy."  I once
bought a cow that Rina had painted because I could not stop laughing
when I saw it. (I like her cows and hippos best.) She draws her animals with a lot of affection and humor.

Text as Thin as Skin

This weekend’s The New York Times Magazine talks about the latest in ephemeral literature:

Most artists spend their careers trying to create something that will live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of whom will have one word of the story tattooed on his or her body. The story, titled "Skin," will appear only on the collective limbs, torsos and backsides of its participants. And decades from now, when the last of Jackson’s "words" dies, so, too, will her tale.