Economy of a new scale publishing

Ah, the economy. It’s hard times in the publishing business, and that means harder work for many of us. Ironically, as page counts drop in some print products, workload actually increases as the online transition pushes ahead. And that’s pretty much where my life is right now.I’m not actually getting much chance to do any thinking, strategic work or planning, which is one of the reasons things are pretty quiet around here. It’s all a case of doing what needs to be done now. We’re running a whole bunch of internal training courses and I’m teaching on three of them, which is giving me more direct contact with more of the business than ever before. Sometimes the results are inspiring. and occasionally they’re more on the “full and frank exchange of views” end of the spectrum.

But here’s the difference to a year ago. Everybody knows that change is in the air. The news about newspaper and magazine closures has permeated to pretty much every working journalist. People may not agree about the direction that journalism needs to take to survive, and discussions that many in the journalistic blogsphere worked through years ago are opening up again as new voices join the discussion, and the mainstream of journalism is no longer looking at many of the issues we were promoting back then as fringe ideas.

In some ways, I miss the cosy atmosphere of the journo blogs a couple of years back, but that’s gone for good now. Change is everywhere in this industry, some of it for good, some of it very much for the bad. And that change is rippling through the blogs, too.

There's not many of us left posting. Those that are are getting more serious and professional. More people are paying attention — and that sometimes makes it harder to write.

But it makes it more worthwhile, too.