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The Editorial
Hints, Tips, Tricks and Anecdotes for Editors
Archived Issue # 02,
JUNE 6
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DO FREELANCE EDITORS HAVE A FUTURE?
The inspiration for this month's Editorial comes from Ken Cotton, an Internet
acquaintance who lives in Japan.
Ken said:
"A few years ago people were saying that the Internet would
kill newspapers and magazines. They were wrong. But the mobile
Internet will really shake things up. I have all I need on-line
now."
The verdict on Newspapers and Magazines is not in yet but the decision is definitely
leaning toward the electric chair. Of the top ten print publications in the US
only two or three have shown any positive growth in the past few years and, from
what I have read, I believe this is generally true for newspapers as well as for
the number of hours of television watching.(See below)
I would also make a bet that this is true all over the world where the Internet
is freely available. People now have to divide their time between magazines, newspapers,
television, movies, email, and the Internet, not to mention books and letters.
(When was the last time you received a good old-fashioned snail mail letter
that wasn't junk mail?)
So where does that leave the editors of the world? Fortunately, the editor's
position with the arrival of the Internet cannot be equated with the demise of
the horse whip manufacturers in the early 20th century. Writers are still writing.
People are still reading. Editors are still doing what editors do.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the Internet has had a major impact on the
publishing and editing industry. We edit differently, with a different focus and
purpose. The Internet is not only a new invention or a new medium. It has changed
the way we live and, more to the point, it has changed the way we think. Fast,
quick, short have become the keywords in publishing and editing.
For on-line academic journals, facts and figures will take precedence over the
lazy logical stroll towards the conclusion that I used to enjoy while slumbering
in The Stacks at U.B.C. (University of British Columbia) Full length novels
are destined to become items for museums. Short, punchy stories will be the norm
for fiction. The art of condensing a whole range of emotion into one or two pages
or screens, or even paragraphs, will become the writer's challenge. Dostoyevsky
would, literally, not fit in.
The editor's position is safe for the moment but, like professional translators
now becoming nervous about machine translation software, we had better be scanning
the horizon for that geeky nerd who comes up with the idea to create totally hands
off story writing software that will compile, edit, proofread, build a Web page,
publish it and run the marketing campaign. In three seconds!
A wonderful resource site for stats. You can find pretty
much anything worth keeping stats about and some things nobody
should care about. (Do I really need to know how many green
toilets there are in the state of New Hampshire?) http://jmc.sbu.edu/faculty/dwilkins/resources.html
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