Thursday, May 04, 2006
Blurring The Lines (Part 1): Writer and Reader
byBefore the Internet, it was easy to distinguish between the writer and the reader. Journalists gathered information and wrote news stories; readers absorbed what was relevant and/or interesting.
Writers wrote articles or feature stories; readers leafed through the daily, weekly or monthly titles and decided if the feature was worth their attention.
Copywriters wrote ads; readers (viewers, listeners) were exposed to them.
Authors wrote books; publishers predetermined readership by which few books would get printed—and fewer yet—which ones would be publicized and promoted.
Public Relations strategists wrote their messages and worked their channels. If the relationship with an editor and the content was right, a PR story with the intended message might appear to the targeted readers.
Prior to the Web, the readers had no choice about the part they played because there were people, organizations, big business and multi-million dollar printing presses standing in their way. No more.
The Web and other technologies have changed all that. Want to be a publisher? Instead of an investment that could be millions of dollars, you can now be a publisher for essentially nothing if you have access to the Internet. Want to be a published author? As long as you define being published as digitally having your writing instantly exposed to potentially millions of people, you can be a published writer in minutes with a blog. In addition, the wait time to fill the distribution chain with your words has gone from hours, weeks and months to seconds.
If you want to be a book author, traditional publishing is still an important option, but if you want to get a book out without the obstacles, the wait, the heartache, and the fuss, you can do it yourself with an e-book. Look at successful blogger/change agent/author Seth Godin. He has had several successful books published the conventional way: All Marketers Are Liars, Purple Cow, Permission Marketing, and several more. However, he has also published a number of free e-books that have been downloaded by millions: Unleashing The Idea Virus, Who’s There, Flipping The Funnel, and Knock Knock. If people like the words you write, of course they will download it for free. However, good words also leave people hungry for more, and they will pay for it at Borders, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, etc. One form of publishing feeds the other. Seth knows this and others do, too.
Web 2.0 has given citizen journalists free license to potentially contribute to the newsgathering and dissemination process. Citizen journalism comes in many flavors, and all this has happened so fast as of late that it has obscured the lines between professional and amateur. It certainly hasn’t been without its frustrations.
The readers are now writing, and writers are now reading their thoughts translated through others. It’s a big interesting conversation and with 75,000 new blogs joining the conversation each day, it is bound to get louder.
