I can go on and on. I’m glad to learn about, and read you.

Now, get rid of those Fluevogs. They’re like the parenthetical expression of footwear.

Have a grand day!

To be honest, I wrote this post as much for myself as for anyone else. I’m a little terrified by the possible losses we face, but I’m also hopeful about opportunities to get a smaller amount of really great journalism and other old-school publishing in front of a much larger number of readers. (Mandy Brown’s soothing short post on publishing is my current security blanket.)

What do you think? Can we find ways to hang on to the best parts of the editorial POV from traditional publishing?

@Christopher Burd: Thank you! Years of frustration do tend to focus the mind.

Great phrase!

Erin, you start out by citing the “imminent death of publishing” as a loss of specific media types. I appreciate your point that we need to incorporate many of the processes that evolved within those media. I’m curious about your perspective on another loss/opportunity topic: should we lament the loss of editorial perspectives and filters that we lose as traditional media types–often bastions of quality in service to a unified goal–fold and succumb to user-generated content? What’s the learning opportunity we can retain there?

I think those of us (in content) who come from the editorial world, rather than from information architecture or web writing or marketing, tend to angle toward publishing and its methods. And even though I’ve been doing things like editorial workflow consulting for years, it’s been under the cover of webbier-sounding “new media” ideas.

There’s that lingering notion left over from the first internet boom that everything old is irrelevant, and I find it so refreshing to see people—organizations, even—discover that some traditional processes are so applicable to online publishing.

@Kate Johnson: Yes, definitely. But in the web world—in my sector of it, at least—people are much more likely to talk about the differences and the newness and the conversation and all that than they are about the foundational stuff like editorial processes.

I do get why it’s that way: we needed some way to convince clients that building a brochure site was a dumb way to communicate with an online audience. So we talked about conversation and two-way communication and social media and so on, which we needed to do. Now we just need to go back and pick up those more traditional publishing tools and processes and adapt them to these new uses.