Business Insight Zone

Regular readers of Scalzi’s blog will know he’s a good one for a choice phrase on most any subject, but in this post his success as a blogger and science-fiction author and his background as a print journalist merge to inform his opinion particularly well:

The problem I have with print people blaming the Internet for their troubles is that blaming the Internet allows them to ignore — and indeed, actively avoid — taking responsibility for their own acts that have contributed and are contributing to their current bad times. This happens with all print media, but SF is really hot on it. And it’s bunk. Long before the Internet could have been an active threat, subscriber numbers at the science fiction magazines were dropping. If the Internet is a dire threat to them now, it’s in no small part because they made themselves sick enough to be picked off by one major threat or another, and it just happens it will be the Internet that will deliver the coup de grace (in fact it’s rather more likely it’ll be problems with magazine distributors, but hey, why not blame the Internets anyway?).

(Read the whole post at this link.)

The bit about publishers’ making themselves sick enough to be picked off reminds me of a favorite quotation:

If a particular cause, such as the accidental outcome of a battle, has destroyed a State, a general cause existed that created a situation in which the loss of a single battle could result in the collapse of the State.
–Montesquieu

Which also reminds me of Hemingway’s line that bankruptcy happens “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

That’s what’s been happening to too many members of the print-media old guard for many years now. Since I cut my eye teeth in print journalism, that makes me a little sad — but the wailing from the print-media dinosaurs Scalzi talks about just makes me annoyed.

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Category: Internet, Media