I found this photo from a blog that I recently mentioned: Books on the Nightstand. If you haven’t subscribed to their podcast already, you should. It’s wonderful. Ann and Michael have a great rapport and while their tastes in genres may differ they share a love of good books. I think you will enjoy it. Do you have a favorite book podcast or blog? Drop me a line and let me know about it. I’d love to spread the word.

What a great photo. When I think of all of the books I’d like to read and wonder where I will find the time, I only have to think of this image. I hate to admit how many hours I waste watching third-rate movies. Thinking about it makes my head shrink as pictured. So there is my early New Year’s resolution. I’m going to better manage my free time, such that it is.

Now I’m off to turn a page and turn off the television.

The Old World of media is changing, partly due to current economic conditions but mostly due to a restructuring of how people receive their news and information. To say it is all moving online is a bit simplistic, but the situation can be summarized in some sense: In a wired world, information wants to be free. But during this transition, is an economic model keeping pace with the changing readership demographics? Most certainly not. And with retail and housing sectors taking in on the chin, media is close behind. It is almost hard to keep up with the daily announcements of media companies’ and newpaper publishers’ “restructuring” efforts.

A couple announcements of note: First, Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, announced it would be laying off as many as 600 people. According to this Folio article, these cuts come in the wake cuts that have already taken place. “Last week, there were approximately 30 layoffs at Time Inc.’s Southern Progress group. Time Inc. had already cut roughly 100 jobs from its magazine publishing division this year.”

And also late last month, The New York Times published an article highlighting only a few of the recent layoffs among newspaper publishers. “Clearly the sky is falling,” the newspaper said. “The question now is how many people are going to be left to cover it.”

A summary from the article:"It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper ,,, And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people ,,, t goes on. The day before, the Tribune Company had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago. The Star-Ledger of Newark, the 15th-largest paper in the country, which was threatened with closing, will apparently survive, but only after it was announced that the editorial staff would be reduced by 40 percent.”

The New York Times article does a good job of explaining what has become obvious to all of us who work in the industry. Clearly there is still demand for our product, as more people than ever are reading newspapers and magazines. The catch is that they are not reading on paper any longer, and 90 percent of revenues still come from printed advertisements. Ours is an industry ripe for a technological innovation. We’ve got the content that can’t be found anywhere else. The Times story ends with a prescient story.

“At the recent American Magazine Conference, one of the speakers worried that if the great brands of journalism — the trusted news sources readers have relied on — were to vanish, then the Web itself would quickly become a “cesspool” of useless information. That kind of hand-wringing is a staple of industry gatherings.

“But in this case, it wasn’t an old journalism hack lamenting his industry. It was Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google.”

I found this link to some of the most beautiful bookstores in the world at the Web page for a favorite podcast of mine: Books on the Nightstand. Nearly all of these beautiful stores are located outside the United States. I think the feature I like best is this wonderful staircase at The Lello, located in Porto, Portugal.

As you know, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded this week to French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Many readers and thinkers feel the list of writers the Nobel has passed over makes a much more impressive group. Writer Ted Gioia would give this year’s award to American Don DeLillo; he also makes his own list of winners in an “alternative universe."

Is the book business over as we know it? I hope not. An article in New York magazine has some people talking about the subject. Here is their headline: “The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.”

I think I agree that the future might be “outside of the corporate world,” but I don’t have any idea what that would look like. The story’s author, Boris Katcha, writes: “The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

“Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.”

It’s time for magazines to reassert their place in today’s crowded media marketplace. At least that’s what some industry trade associations feel about it. The Magazine Publishers of America has hired a boutique ad agency to create a campaign designed to promote the power of print. It’s called “Under the Influence of Magazines.”

“The campaign comprises print and online advertisements as well as information on a Web site (magfacts.org). The goal is to show that advertising in magazines encourages consumers to consider buying products — a phenomenon known as purchase intent — and stimulates them to go online to shop or to learn more about items they might want to buy,” writes Stuart Elliott in the New York Times.

It’s not a laughing matter. According to data collected by the trade association, “the number of magazine ad pages dropped off 6.4 percent [during the first quarter of 2008] compared with the same period of 2007, then fell 8.2 percent in the second quarter compared with the second quarter of last year.”

The print ads will feature three prominent brands during its first phase (Adidas, Haagen-Dazs and Mini Cooper) and will appear in industry trade magazines such as Advertising Age and Brandweek

"Fame is always a product of the present culture: topical and variable, hence ephemeral. Writers are made otherwise. What writers prize is simpler, quieter and more enduring than clamorous Fame: it is recognition. Fame, by and large, is an accountant’s category, tallied in Amazonian sales. Recognition, hushed and inherent in the silence of the page, is a reader’s category: its stealth is its wealth.”

Read the rest of what renowned writer Cynthia Ozick has to say about writing and writers here.

I read about this interesting idea the other day in the New York Times. It suggests that in the future perhaps only that reporting which people will directly pay for will be done. Does this mean that journalism goes out only to the highest bidder? What about the stories that nobody wishes to see the light of day?

From Sarah Kersaw’s story in the Times: “The idea, which they are calling “community-funded journalism,” is now being tested in the San Francisco Bay area, where a new nonprofit, Spot Us, is using its Web site, spot.us, to solicit ideas for investigative articles and the money to pay for the reporting. But the experiment has also raised concerns of journalism being bought by the highest bidder.

“The idea is that anyone can propose a story, though the editors at Spot Us ultimately choose which stories to pursue. Then the burden is put on the citizenry, which is asked to contribute money to pay upfront all of the estimated reporting costs. If the money doesn’t materialize, the idea goes unreported.

Jay Rosen, whose blog I link to here on my blog roll, had this to say in the story about journalism today: ““We’re at a point now where nobody actually knows where the money is going to come from for editorial goods in the future. My own feeling is that we need to try lots of things. Most of them won’t work. You’ll have a lot of failure. But we need to launch a lot of boats.”

Are we still a nation of readers? Test scores, surveys, and just our own assessment of how we spend our free time today tell us that something has changed over the past few decades. We aren’t spending as much time with the written word as we once did. Of course, I’m over exagerating the problem, but many scholars and teachers feel that American students don’t read as much as they should. It affects everything else they will do in school, experts say. Is there really a problem?

This article in the New York Times does a good job looking at the problem. Nadia, the typical American teenager introduced to us in the story, doesn’t read in her spare time. Instead she text-messages her friends, spends time online in chat rooms and on favorite Web sites. “Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association,” writes reporter Motoko Rich.

“As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.” It’s an interesting debate, and passions run high on both sides of the issue.

If you were to pick your favorite literary passage to be permanently embedded into your skin, which would you choose? Something inspiring? Or would you choose a passage more emblematic of your core beliefs? “Tattoos may be associated in the public mind with bikers and football hooligans,” writes Matthew Moore in London’s Telegraph, “but the growing popularity of more literary designs is finding an outlet on the Internet.”

Take the quiz and identify the source of the quotes for the body arts. More photos of literary tattoos can be found at http://www.contrariwise.org.