The publishing blog Pimp My Novel has a few pointed notes about the now-standard author advances, including a consideration of whether foregoing advances would help publishers/authors/readers:

There are many arguments for and against the no-advance model, but I think it's best summed up as follows: publishers will be much more willing to take risks on new authors if they don't need to pay an advance, but since this removes the "we paid for this and we have to make it work" pressure, many a publisher may reduce the amount of time, money, and effort spent on marketing these books. While a no-advance model would likely result in a higher royalty rate for the author, it won't do much good if net sales are damaged by a reduction in in-house support.

Of course, the issue doesn’t end there. Twitter has been abuzz (or atwit, or atweet) with conversation about the topic. It may be kind of insider-y, but hey now we’re on the inside, too. Thanks, uncle internet!

(Thanks, The Rumpus.)

Source: Pimp My Novel

Image by photomequickbooth, licensed under Creative Commons.

News Corp., parent company of the notoriously anti-green Fox News, plans to go entirely carbon neutral by the end of 2010.

In her Mother Jones article “Fair and…Carbon Neutral?,” Kate Sheppard explores Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to make his media conglomerate completely green through “reducing energy use in its office facilities, moving to renewable energy, and purchasing offsets to take care of the remaining emissions.”

Not surprisingly, News Corp.’s green movement seems to be fueled less by altruism or any meaningful concern for the environment than it does financial gain and economic incentives (Rupert Murdoch referred to the whole effort as “simply good business,” and Sheppard points out that News Corp. is merely making a voluntary change that will soon become mandatory for many companies).

Still, recognizing its relative insignificance in the grand scheme of global emissions reduction, the corporation is focusing on spreading its eco-friendly mindset to a group with a much larger carbon footprint than its own: its audience. By “encouraging subsidiaries to run public service announcements on global warming” and “weaving climate-related themes into its entertainment programs,” News Corp. hopes to initiate more far-reaching change through its viewers.

After listening to Sean Hannity denounce carbon offsets as a “fraud” or Glenn Beck sneer derisively at the shrinking polar ice caps, I can’t help but think Fox News’ audience will be slightly confused when they are met with a PSA promoting greener living during the subsequent commercial break.

Source: Mother Jones (article not yet available online)

Image by Gage Skidmore, licensed under Creative Commons.

Russia stretches across 11 time zones and 6,200 miles. With such expansive territory, the country’s topography and demographics are more diverse than fretful Western media encourage us to believe. There is one thing, however, that 96 percent of Russians have in common: Channel One, the most widely broadcast state-run television channel in Russia.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin can be found across the spectrum of television programming on Channel One. In a column for Prospect, Ben Judah writes that a “relentless, never-ending PR campaign [is] ... spinning the prime minister into various guises designed to appeal to different groups across Russia’s fractured society.”  Putin has appeared on The Battle for Respect, a popular hip-hop program. On another program he comes to the rescue of a desperate housewife by ordering an avaricious grocer to lower his sausage prices.

Mostly, Putin appears as a vigorous adventurer. “He is the picture of Russia’s strength,” writes Judah. “Rural Russians can identify with Putin swimming bare-chested down a river … after the Moscow metro bombings in Late March, Putin sought to shore up his image by single-handedly tagging a polar bear.”

The spin isn’t entirely malicious.  “Men here can expect to live to the age of 59 on average—below the life expectancy of Pakistanis or even Palestinians,” says a Russian diplomat trainee named Masha. The prime minister has to promote health and exercise at any cost, he says, “and if that means bare-chested calendars, swimming shoots, judo or being on a rap show—so be it.”

With only 33 percent internet penetration, television serves as the common platform for Russians, but that reach doesn’t always serve Putin’s interests. 

When, at a recent televised charity concert for sick children, Russian rocker Yuri Shevchuk, a legendary dissident artist, challenged Putin on his record of civil rights abuses, including the lack of media autonomy and crackdowns on public assembly, the country watched Mr. Putin squirm in his chair and defend freedom of speech in an angry retort. 

As Vladimir Kara-Murza of World Affairs Journal writes, “This was widely taken as a message that ... a promise made in such public setting by the prime minister of Russia would not be easily broken.” The very next day protesters in Moscow's Triumfalnaya Square were being beaten and detained by police.

“At the end of the meeting with Mr. Putin,” writes Kara-Murza, “Yuri Shevchuk proposed a toast ‘on behalf of our children’ who, he hoped, will grow up not in a ‘gloomy, corrupt, and totalitarian country,’ but in a ‘bright and democratic’ Russia, where ‘everyone is equal before the law.’ ‘Like toast, like drink,’ Mr. Putin retorted. The glasses were filled with plain water.”

Sources: Prospect (article not yet available online), World Affairs Journal

Image by azrianman, licensed under Creative Commons.

Should a journalist be friends with the subject(s) of his or her reporting? The Columbia Journalism Review ponders the question in the wake of a weekend party hosted by Vice President Joe Biden. The gathering saw both White House staff and Washington journalists chilling out and shooting squirt guns. In every single one of the pictures on Gawker, there is what appears to be a Super Soaker. Which begs the question: how many departments of the U.S. government are controlled by toymaker Hasbro? Indeed, Mr. Potato Head’s idiotic grin suggests a governmental budgeting strategy that overwhelmingly prioritizes the promotion of corn and corn subsidies, protecting his own dirty little starch.

Source: Columbia Journalism Review, Gawker

Image by World Economic Forum, licensed under Creative Commons.

Writing for The Awl, Maria Bustillos argues convincingly against recent suggestions that the cognitive habits enforced by web browsing are making people dumb. Taking on Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (recently expanded into a book), Bustillos dismantles one of Carr’s main ideas. As she says:

Hyperlinks, the proliferation of which Mr. Carr largely blames for his mental infirmity, are in no way different from footnotes. Footnotes, too, demand “microseconds of decision-making attention.” Just as a footnote does, a hyperlink beckons you away from the main text in order to examine tangentially-related but relevant material. Exactly like a hyperlink, a footnote often has the effect of sending you down a series of rabbit holes, from which you emerge hours later, armed with a dozen other books—that is, if you want to investigate the subject in fine detail. If you don’t, then by all means, you can skip the footnotes.

So do footnotes also “sap cognitive power from the reading process”?

Heavily annotated works have been useful for centuries to students of every discipline we’ve got, and their distraction-potential, though clear, is completely eclipsed by the invaluable advantage of access to a ton of carefully-signposted material that can greatly ease the conduct of serious study. It’s well worth the extra effort of concentration; if you want the goods, you’ll put up with the cost.

Carr had addressed the comparison of footnotes and hyperlinks, noting that

[u]nlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.

But Bustillos isn’t having it:

The fogginess of this reasoning—what does this mean, ‘propel’?—is evident throughout the original essay. The means by which one navigates through text are consistent within the medium—you page through all the pages of a book, and you click through all the pages of a website. For some reason, “propulsion” is supposed to be bad for you and “pointing” isn’t, but Carr doesn’t even attempt to explain why.

Source: The Awl

Image by Anonymous9000, licensed under Creative Commons.

We’ve been fans of the solution-oriented research and policy magazine Miller-McCune for awhile (we even gave it the Utne Independent Press Award for best science/tech coverage in 2009), but now it’s in the mainstream spotlight of the Los Angeles Times. In his rather favorable profile of the magazine and its founder Sara Miller McCune, reporter James Rainey describes the publication as “that bright and earnest new student, full of promise but still striving to get closer to the head of the class.” Rainey feels the magazine could appeal to a broader base and bring in more “everyday characters from outside academia.” True enough, but you have to admit that Miller-McCune does a fine job of making all that wonky research highly digestible.

Source: Los Angeles Times