Monthly Archives: January 2009

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Seth Godin asks what we’ll miss about printed newspapers

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newspapersWhen newspapers are gone, what will you miss? asks Seth Godin. His answer? Not a great deal. He takes the opposite view to the journalists who tell us that the ‘proper’ investigative journalism will be killed off by the migration to the web:

… if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.

The obvious response here, especially from anyone in journalism, is going to be “well, what the hell does Godin know about running a newspaper?” I can’t answer that question, but I do know that Godin understands marketing, economics and human nature pretty well, and I have to say there’s something very logical about what he’s saying.

Or am I just being sold the story I want to hear? [image by drb62]

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Clarkesworld reopens to fiction submissions

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Cover art for Clarkesworld Magazine #28Via their newly-hired non-fiction editor Cheryl Morgan comes news that the consistently excellent Clarkesworld Magazine is once again open to fiction submissions.

If you don’t read Clarkesworld already, you really should do; it’s one of the sites that I hold up as an exemplar of quality fiction on the web, and they set a high bar to measure up against. And all at no cost to you, the reader – so drop in a donation or buy a physical copy while you’re there, why don’t ya?

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Not a literary manifesto: Stross on Strangecraftian fiction

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cthulhuCharles Stross discusses the influences behind The Atrocity Archives and the rich seam of existential horror from whence they are mined:

There’s nothing terribly funny about “A Colder War”: I was groping in the dark for a way to express the alienating horror of nuclear annihilation that I’d grown up with, and Lovecraft’s monsters came perfectly to hand. The existential dread they evoke is not so alien to those of us who lived through the original Cold War.

[image from rainvt on flickr]

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Is there life on Mars? Atmospheric methane says ‘maybe’

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MarsAfter last year’s long-awaited confirmed discovery of water on the red planet, David Bowie comes another step closer to finding the answer to his question: NASA called a press conference today to announce that they have, in partnership with some university science teams, “achieved the first definitive detection of methane in the atmosphere of Mars”.

So what’s the big deal with that? Basically, there’s two reasons you might find methane in a planetary atmosphere: geological activity or biological activity. It’s going to take a lot more work to discover which of the two is the culprit in the case of Mars (and the NASA announcement does a better job that I can of explaining it all), but either option is pretty exciting to space nerds… after all, it’s not all that long ago that we pretty much assumed the whole planet was inert.

And as a side-tangent, this is great political timing from NASA, whether accidental or deliberate – with a new president about to enter the White House with promises to shake things up, announcements like this get everybody talking about space with that old-school sensawunda I remember from my childhood… and given the bleak state of the news headlines at the moment, something to make us look up from the mundane for a moment can only be a positive. Something big to dream about. [image by chipdatajeffb]

I mean, just think – life on Mars! It’s like something out of a science fiction novel, isn’t it? 😉

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How to Communicate More Effectively, Part 5 – Build Conviction

[How to Communicate More Effectively is a series of guest posts from Gareth L Powell. In case you missed ’em, here’s part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.]

Making your audience want your product is one thing, convincing them to actually put their hands in their pockets is quite another. You have to get over their natural reluctance to buy or act. This can be done in a number of ways, the most common being the testimonial and the product comparison.

Testimonials are short quotes from celebrities or satisfied customers endorsing the product. Including one or more of these helps to reassure the reader that their decision to buy from you or use your service is a wise and sensible decision.

Comparing your product with a more expensive option also helps to encourage the conviction that the decision is correct.

Similarly, if you’re in a position to offer any sort of guarantee (“Your money back if not 100% satisfied) then this is the place to do it.