The Long Fuse

So far as I know, there's no way to fake an entry date in Blogger, so this is my answer to mailing myself a postmarked sealed letter to prove when I thought of a title for a book that I have been writing since January.-

Chis Anderson's book The Long Tail is about marketing and media, but I propose a book called The Long Fuse. Yes, I know Laurence Lafore wrote a book about WWI with that title, so it's a well-worn metaphor, but not so much with regard to the media.

As far as I can tell, the long fuse as applied to media is traceable to Kevin Carey's commentary in The Chronicle of High Education, April 3, 2009, which I re-read last night. He makes the point that newspapers had a 15-year fuse to self-destruct after the advent of the Internet. his purpose was to note that universities had a longer fuse, that students were getting comfortable with online classes that are analogous to the cash cow for newspapers (i.e., classified ads). Good analogy, although we can quibble that most newspaper are really dead yet, when their operating margins are still in the double digits.

The Ticking Time-Bomb was another possibility, but it lacks the tie-in to The Long Tail. Mr. Carey does not make the fuse-tail comparison, although Andy Nulman makes mild reference in his blog November 29, 2007.

So that's my hook: Write a book about the demise of the media, but frame the timing as a long fuse, estimating how many years each medium may expect to survive (or adapt to) Web-enabled competition. Newspapers are sick, especially the heavily-leveraged ones, and apt to be first to go the route of the mastodon.

Pet peeves, pt. 1

.99 cents is not the same as 99 cents, but you'd never know it the way some nitwits make supermarket signs

It's so tempting to toss them a penny and say, keep the change!