Lorin Stein on Publishing

Even as I contemplate my exit from it, publishing holds a special place in my heart. It most likely always will.

Lorin Stein has been blogging at The Atlantic on the topic of publishing. As one would expect, it's excellent. After discussing the the death of book reviews in local papers, Stein says this:

I left book publishing to edit The Paris Review because I think the situation can be dramatically improved. Not in the high-stakes game of bestsellers and Time covers, but down here on the ground, where reputations and markets are built and readers make up their own minds. I want there to be a magazine where fiction and poetry come first, where there's no hype, and where the aim is to reach the 100,000 people who, a few years ago, had never heard of Roberto Bolano—but whose lives have been slightly changed by his fiction.

 Stein writes often at The Paris Review's blog, by the way. They do good things there, they do.

The Future of TV

Via Kottke, here's an article written by Michael Hirschorn in March '09 edition of The Atlantic, titled "The Future Is Cheese," about how--starting soon--it won't make financial sense for TV networks to produce high-priced, character-heavy shows, a k a, good TV. Lots of good stuff here, including this:

As network television takes up a lower-brow position in the cultural pecking order, the higher-quality, more expensive shows will become increasingly independent of the networks that broadcast them. Eventually, networks will stop being brands and start becoming, at least in part, mere “distribution platforms,” a first stop for cultural products on their long journey through other digital media, subscription services, and mobile devices—more like movie-theater chains, in other words, than like movie studios of yore. Just as a premiere in a movie house now largely serves as a way to market the DVD, or sell products, so too is the TV “premiere” just a billboard for the show’s future life.