Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Now, next

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Hopefully by now you all have watched the new demos of Magazine 3.0’s (?) that have been released  lately (Wired, Sports Illustrated). Sigh. Even if you ignore the simple fact that they have been made for a platform that has not even been announced yet (have we ever seen so many major media companies tying their fates to Apple before? Because lets face it, only Apple is capable of delivering a game-changing new platform right now) we still have a few pretty big problems with the Next generation.  First of all, there is very little next to be found.

This is a 100,000 word discussion and I just don’t have the energy for all of that. So let me break it down in notepad form on what is keeping me up at night this week.

  • More shocking than how depressing that Wired video is (WTF is going on with the audio, are all magazines going to be read in techno clubs in the future?!), is that the concept is basically Advanced-PDF. Hold the phone… Wired is one of the best designed, most thoughtful magazines being published today, so how could their new product look like it was built on the following budget: 24 pizzas, 2 cases of Red Bull, 1 overtime weekend with 4 code monkeys and a bored assistant art director?
  • Before I saw the Sports Illustrated video (which I was impressed by), I first saw this link from TechCrunch… and in seeing just that picture of the SI page (looked a lot like looking up micro film in the public library, and even the page looked yellowed in the image as if it was really old) I almost lost my shit. Oh my god, oh my god, we are all doomed…
  • “Magazines are fucked, still” has been the prevailing comments from the Tech blogs I’ve seen in the past 24 hours… heavy use of sarcasm and “even if this didn’t suck” no one is going to pay for it, with a bunch of “content should be free” sort of bullshit as well. Guess what assholes, content is not going to be free and all of the little filter/bottom feeders out there from HuffPost on down are going to go into their own little tailspin as soon as the big media corporations put up pay walls to nearly all of their incredibly expensive content. So now you can’t just link and comment anymore… uh, oh, looks who’s fucked now.
  • Tablets aren’t coming out in the next 6 months, and we’ll probably be lucky to be waking up next to one covered in drool this time next year. But obviously with this sort of support and groundswell they are coming.
  • Tablets are going to be expensive and the only one making any money at all on them at all in the next year is probably going to be the hardware manufacturers.
  • I’m really excited for The New York Times to put up a pay wall… like today. I can’t wait to pay them for their incredibly well executed content. I’m so excited that I just bought a New Yorker digital-only subscription. A lot of us are… stop giving it away and allowing everyone else to build sites that just loot those links and rake in ad revenue.
  • If this Sports Illustrated mock-up is even 40% as hungry as the final release, the need for imagery, still and moving, is going up at Time Inc maybe 500% or more. This is why anyone signing a contract that gives away all digital rights for their work right now is going to be in huge trouble.
  • The only thing I liked about the Wired demo was that it looked like you could actually read the text, which is one of the worst things about reading on the internet now. Please build in a Kindle-like integrated text-only mode so that those few of us who actually read anymore can do so without ruining their vision.
  • Catharine P. Taylor wrote in her bnet “piece” this morning about the SI video that “it’s too late” for magazines… that’s bullshit. Catharine, you and every person like you, including me, and hundreds of millions of people around the world today, even more than yesterday or 5 years ago or 50 years ago wants to be informed, wants information, wants media. They want it on their own terms and they don’t want publishing to act like they are a bunch of moronic idiots who only want Hollywood gossip, a casserole recipe, and the jumble — but they want it.
  • And lastly I just want to remind all of the scholars out there delivering these sermons on the future of media and blah blah blah blah that you can’t begin the story from a flat, even plane. The story begins in hell, with buildings on fire and people straight-up scared. And from that place the bullshitting about social media has to be understood because we aren’t in fairy-land and bloggers aren’t necessarily adding anything at all to the conversation, or at the very least are rarely “experts.” It’s not about crafting a democracy of information… it’s about creating a better, more engaging, and more informative experience that runs on CONTENT.

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Magellan

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

So check out these new digs, eh! Many, many thanks to Shut Up I’m Awesome for building this spartan and watery new space. There was nothing particularly wrong with the old drunken one, but with so many things about to change at JLP headquarters I felt like a new design and name would be a fun way to restart my interest in exploring the finer points of freelance work, and so here we are… Pacific.

Magellan christened the name for our western ocean in late 1520 for the peace and stillness he found (relativity is hard to see clearly) during the Earth’s inaugural circumnavigation, and its always been my favorite body of water to get lost in as an idea. The incredible immensity, the opposite of its location to my life, the color of the water in picture and thought, the Pacific is the ocean in my dreams and represents not only the greener grass of things unknown, but also the notion that everything is a lot more complicated, ironic, and plainly rough than even old names suggest.

We hear all our lives about the “gentle, stormless Pacific,” and about the “smooth and delightful route to the Sandwich Islands,” and about the “steady blowing trades” that never vary, never change, never ”chop around,” and all the days of our boyhood we read how that infatuated old ass, Balboa, looked out from the top of a high rock upon a broad sea as calm and peaceful as a sylvan lake, and went into an ecstasy of delight, like any other Greaser over any other trifle, and shouted in his foreign tongue and waved his country’s banner, and named his great discovery “Pacific”–thus uttering a lie which will go on deceiving generation after generation of students while the old ocean lasts.

In a word, the Pacific is “rough,” for seven or eight months in the year–not stormy, understand me–not what one could justly call stormy, but contrary, baffling and very “rough”. Therefore, if that Balboa-constrictor had constructed a name for it that had “Wild,” or ”Untamed,” to it, there would have been a majority of two months in the year in favor and in support of it.

- Mark Twain, letter to the Sacramento Daily Union, 4/17/1866

I don’t have a mission statement for the new blog because I’m not sure how it will be especially different than the old one, or from the half-dozen blogs before that, which I also led down the path to destruction. I would, however, like this blog to be a bit more about what things are working in freelance photography, despite the terrible climate we are all working under, and maybe scratch at some of the contrast between what things seem like and how they might actually be (relatively is all I have in stock as well, unfortunately). There will likely be a few rants, that’s just me, but I’m going to try to think about the things that drive me and my passion for the craft of photography, and hopefully that and the absence of bourbon will keep things on more of an even keel.

Welcome to Pacific!

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