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December 23, 2007
Journalists need to think entrepreneural
NY Times: Entrepreneurial Journalism in the Facebook Age -- If journalists worry about their future value as the online world grows, they should think of themselves as journalist entrepreneurs. For those who can develop and market their content, it could be a very lucrative time.
Posted by eubie at 9:56 PM permalink
Top-selling books written on mobile phones
This is almost unbelievable. Sydney Morning Herald: In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage
Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined "to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture".
It's a targeted audience
Usually they are written by first-time writers, using one-name pseudonyms, for an audience of young female readers - who, in Japan especially, consult their mobile phones so regularly that the habit could be mistaken for a tic. The stories traverse teen romance, sex, drugs and other adolescent terrain in a succession of clipped one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a mobile phone interface. Scene and character development are notably missing.
Posted by eubie at 8:19 PM permalink