Neglect and l33tsauce
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here on Eat Sleep Publish. I’ve been neglecting this blog while I’ve been working hard on my latest project: L33tsauce. It’s a publishing sort of venture, but it’s got everything to do with video games, and not really anything to do with traditional journalism. One of the conclusions that I’ve been coming to while writing Eat Sleep Publish over the past year and a half is that it’s increasingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to run a profitable content company on the internet if you’re paying for your content to be produced. At the same time, who

New Cooperatives
From Romenesko: The Chicago News Cooperative (CNC) Wednesday announced that the Chicago Tribune’s leading City Hall reporter has joined the staff of the new multi-platform news venture that will offer public service reporting about Chicago for the New York Times, the city’s public television station and on the Internet. The idea of similarly structured freelance cooperatives was briefly floated last night at The Pitch as well. It could be a workable structure, building content and selling it to multiple buyers in multiple media formats.

Newspaper circulation, a visual reference
Very interesting chart of circulation at several major newspapers over the past few decades. The site I got the image from is loading suuuuper slow, probably because they got linked for Daring Fireball, so for now I’ve uploaded the image here: It is apparently a very bad idea to be the Los Angeles Times.

The Pitch is tomorrow – Freelance edition
Tuesday, October 27th, from 7:30 – 9:30pm, we’ll be gathering at Lucid Jazz Club in the U-district in Seattle for drinks and good conversation. The topic of tomorrow’s Pitch is simple: Will all journalists become freelancers? New organizations are already finding it much harder to justify full time staff for what amounts to part-time profit. As our industry-wide dive into digital continues, and news organizations learn to compete with leaner, meaner content producers, something’s gotta give. It might well be the career. I can see a future where very few people land full-time jobs at news organizations – a few editors, an ad sales

Free Book Experiment
Have you seen Cory Doctorow’s Free Book experiment (redux)? Cory is offering another free book, with an interesting philosophical approach: For this project, I’ve taken an oath to lose no money. That means that my capital expenditures have to be as low as possible. In the ideal world, every object I make available will either cost nothing to produce or will be physically instantiated only after it has been ordered and paid for. The question is: would he make more money if he just sold everything? Probably not.