May 9th, 2008
All text is not created equal.
I randomly had lunch recently with an old media business guy. We were talking, as is often the case, about the news business and the different ways in which newspapers and magazines are moving online. As I was describing TPM and our different distribution channels he asked me if we’d ever thought about repackaging our content and and putting it out as a physical TPM paper product. We hadn’t, I explained, both for business reasons (printing is expensive!) and because our content wouldn’t make a bit of sense in that context.
I was reminded all of this while watching the video that CJR made to accompany Ezra Klein’s piece on the Kindle. While I wasn’t 100% clear what he thinks about the Kindle (I’ll have to go read the article, I suppose), he makes an essential point about web native writing at about the second minute:
One of the first blogs I ever read was by a guy named Demosthenes. And he was writing about some political subject and he said “you know, props to him. Props to Bill Clinton.” And I was struck, like someone had slapped me. I was a poltico, I was into it, but I never thought that you could talk about politics in the language I used in every day life. It shocked me. Now I can’t figure out why it was so shocking. Now I do it every day.
Web natives just write differently. They write like people talk.
You produce a different product online. Hyperlinks, tone, form (shorter post that assume readers have read previous posts, etc.). It makes for a fundamentally different product that simply doesn’t translate back onto the printed page.
And the same is true for the common transition of print to online. Newspaper products, moved online unchanged, just don’t translate. That’s why they get chewed up and repackaged by blogs and aggregators (see my post on the so-called “unbundling” of news).
All of which is just to say that what we’re dealing with is not just a transition in medium. We’re in the process of not just radically re-organizing the media business, but media culture. The language is becoming more accessible and the product more interactive. The pretensions are falling and the author is reemerging from behind the barriers of form.
And once you’re there, you can never go home again. All text just isn’t created equal.
