Today marked the happy arrival of Contents Magazine, billing itself as “a new magazine at the intersection of content strategy, online publishing, and new-school editorial work.” A quick look at who’s behind it reveals that this is going to be good.
They came roaring out of the gate with Mandy Brown’s Babies and the Bathwater, which looks at how the shifts in technology have left the practice of publishing playing serious catch-up. Thinking about the interplay between technology, writing, and publishing has been a consistent topic for me lately, so I appreciated an insight like this:
[W]e can no longer think of publishing as a broadcast medium. It isn’t, not anymore. The web requires that we listen and converse as much as (if not more than) we ship. In fact, we cannot assume that publishing of any kind is a distinct activity from belonging to a community. Part of the job of a publisher today is to facilitate discussion—and that means being a part of it. It means that we publish for people, not to them.
Go read the rest for more like that.