Carrier.
Now, this conversation just blew up on Twitter, and it contains a lot of somewhat-related issues that probably need to be handled separately, to the point where they could each spawn an individual blog post. But let’s be reductive and brief here, and try to organize what we’re all thinking about, as it concerns the publication of excellent writing on the internet, possibly in some sort of “periodical”:
Thematic issues
Wherein the content is deliberately arranged, however abstractly, around a specific topic. This usually benefits the content, but it takes more editorial effort to pull off.
The sporadic trickle vs. the fixed schedule
E.g., blog posts vs. issues of a magazine. Or kind of like how K10K worked with blending the two models. This affects readers’ expectations: people anticipate future issues, or they anticipate the possibility of future trickles of content. The anticipation imposes expectations on publishers, who are obligated to publish a certain amount of content on a rigid schedule, or who may be obligated to explain potential lapses in blogging. As publishers, this boils down to a customer service issue, in the event that a deadline happens to slip. As readers, this frequently enforces the belief (whether true or untrue) that we have to read a given issue’s content before the next issue is released.
The corpus vs. the conversation
I care very deeply about the idea that a periodical can build up a massive stash of useful, insightful content over time. Emigre did this. McSweeney’s is doing this. The New Yorker’s longer pieces accomplish this, if you cherry-pick. Lots of long-form journalism does this. Regardless, I believe that 1) we can make a conscious decision to design periodicals such that they fulfill this; 2) this isn’t a black-or-white thing, as some content can be jettisoned when it’s not appropriate to some sort of central mission, or there can be multiple different categorizations of a publication’s content; 3) there’s a positive correlation between broader critical respect of a publication and its ability to function like this.
To me, this is the most interesting topic, and I could probably write a lot more about it, but I’ll leave it be for right now.
Decontextualization and bundling
Content can be reorganized in two ways: separate pieces from one corpus can be put together in new ways, or articles can be collected from many different sources. So e.g. you’d have a playlist only of one artist’s songs, making a mix CD like that; or you’d have a playlist of that artist’s genre that happened to contain a few of the artist’s songs in addition to others’.
The staying power of content
Not like this, although that is still really important, but rather how timely and trendy the content is, and how useful and interesting it will be to read at some point down the line. There is content that I don’t care about tomorrow; there is content that I want to re-read in twenty years. One semi-related point: it’s easier to build a corpus out of content that has more staying power.
The necessity for an iPad app
A native iPad app is never necessary, but if there is one, the content had better be braindead easy to share outside its sandbox. See aforelinked.
I have no idea what I am doing and wrote this in twenty minutes in one take
I’m sure other people have better insights about this, as well as major points that I am surely missing, but I figure this post is easier to read than the tweets page that I posted at the top, there, so that has to be worth something.
