Stereophile has natural advertising audiences, I suspect: recording companies and equipment mfgrs.
So who would buy advertising in such a "publication" about Complexity and related matters? Yes, an occasional book publisher and maybe, in time, some consulting firms selling Complexity as a solution to ??? but then.....
That said, traditional production costs look very different through the lens of online publishing, eliminating much of the cost of traditional pre-press (though good online publishing is still somewhat labor intensive; good copy editors are a treasure) and all of the costs of ink, paper and distribution.
One approach might be to do the quality online publication with something close to but not-rigid regularity, give away the content for the first X days, but after that charge X dollars to download each article in PDF. This strategy, over time, would start to build a library of material that could be used for teaching and by other interested parties. Another strategy could be to give away the first half of an article, but charge for the remaining 50 percent.
In the distant past, I was the editor for Scientific American readers and off-prints. In the mid-'70s we were grossing about $1mill a year with very little production cost (the content had already been paid for; resetting the pages a minimal expense) and a couple guys in the warehouse doing the picking and shipping. I don't have the data, but I doubt that SA is even doing the off-prints any longer. Might it be that everybody in today's digital universe expects to get what they need/want for free ( e.g. Wikipedia, or the Social Science Research Network -- http://www.ssrn.com/ )?
-tom johnson
(who still buys books and whose house overflows with magazines, some of which I get around to reading)
On 7/31/06, steve smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I googled "Hacking Complexity" (as a quoted string) and only got 8 hit,
and only one two occurences were used as titles rather than verbs...
In the spirit of Wil McCarthy's novel "Hacking Matter", I suggest
precisely that title for a book title.
I should also mention (and I've talked privately with a few of you)
that Larry Archibald, the early publisher of Stereophile magazine
approached me about 5 years ago about his desire to start a magazine
that essentially featured all things "Infomesa and SFI". He has a
reputation for high quality, professional-amatuer publishing...
Larry brought Stereophile to NM nearly 25 years ago... and he sees
(saw?) the potential for something similar in this world...
I told him the time was not quite ripe, that as things evolved, I'd let
him know when they might be. At the time Popular
Complexity/Non-linear Science, etc had peaked (as most of the
Employment sections in your resumes will indicate?) and things were
sliding toward a precipice of loss of financial, if not popular
support.
To whatever extent, we are now coming up out of the "bottome" this
might be a good time to engage him.
What do you think about a bimonthly slick glossy (maybe following on
the heels of a book) at the general technical level of Scientific
American?
Maybe there would be some motivation (call it pay and publication
record) for all of us to take our well thought-out contributions here
and turn them into something publishable in a more "Popular" venue.
Thoughts?
- Steve
==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller
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