Rupert Murdoch: iPad the savior of newspapers?
April 8, 2010
The Australian has a great story of NewsCorp (and Fox and the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and, oh, The Australian) chief Rupert Murdoch’s views on the iPad:
“It may well be the saving of the newspaper industry”, by making it cheaper to distribute content to a broader audience, Mr Murdoch said. He expected the iPad to have eight or nine competitors within 12 months.
“There’s going to be tens of millions of these things sold all over the world,” he said.
Let’s hope he’s right. It’s often been said that more people than ever are reading news content, but fewer than ever are paying for it. All eyes are on the WSJ as they try their pay-for-content model. Will the iPad provide that outlet? Is it digital paper?
Hell no. But I’m a traditionalist, and I refuse to buy an e-book reader until I can take notes on the damn thing.
Gizmodo summarized a much longer (and well-worth reading) article thusly: it’s a good starting point for the tablet.
But so far, there’s nothing the iPad does that my Palm Pre can’t.
After the Workshop… then what?
April 3, 2010
If you go through the archives, you’ll find out the shit that went down with my dad taking his own life last summer. Since then, I’ve struggled to read, and finish, so much as a short story. My mind just kind of wanders, and I lose interest.
But I just finished devouring John McNally‘s latest novel, After the Workshop. Somehow, it was the right book at the right time. I’ve got some writing that I need to do—I’m reading a story I’ve yet to write at a wedding in Iowa in two months—but I’ve felt like without writing through what my dad did, I couldn’t get to it. I needed a bit of a kick in the pants.
So I finished this book—a gorgeously rendered novel about a stalled writer who takes a gig as a media escort, carting writers from the airport to book signings in his mufflerless car, his unfinished manuscript taunting him from under a pile of phone books. And it occurred to me that I’ve got to set my issues with my dad aside and start something fresh. I’m itching to sit down at the keyboard again. I know what I’m going to write for the wedding.
John’s short stories from the award-winning collections Troublemakers and Ghosts of Chicago have always gotten me unstuck when I didn’t know what happened next in my thesis/novel, which is finally DONE done and ready to send out. McNally’s one of those writers who should be hugely famous. And to me, he is. Besides being a hell of a guy, and making my mom cry with his heartfelt inscription in her copy of After the Workshop, somehow, he’s the one whose work always gets me unstuck. And with this book, he’s done it in a huge way.
