|
Storytelling And The Summit's Value
Part One: Entertainment And
Money
|
Back to the
Introduction.
MediaChannel: How will the public's lack of interest in reading longer stories on the
Internet affect the way that stories get told?
Richard Tam, CEO, iUniverse.com:
To us, good content and good books will always find their audience. It really
depends on the quality of the content. So what we do is enable a lot more of
this content to reach its market and find its audience. The typical rejection
rate [for getting] published is 94 to 98 percent. So we think there are a lot
of good books that cannot get published because the economics of the current
industry does not allow it to publish books that do not have a well-known
author behind them, even though they are perfectly good books. So what we do
is leverage our technology and enable them to get published and reach this
marketplace.
James Ledbetter, New
York bureau chief of the Industry Standard:
I doubt that we'll ever see the Internet as a medium for long narrative.
Although, there are places where that is available, and they do serve an
audience, but I don't think that this is the thrust of what this medium is
about. How does it affect the way stories are told? I'm not sure that we
really know the answer to that; the medium is still very young. I don't think
that we have an understanding of it, the way that we have an understanding
of, say, television and video and the effects that they've had on narration.
I think that we're going to need at least another 10 years within this medium
to have a grasp of that. And I think that it's an exciting medium because I
think that the maturity of the hyperlink and being able to move from one
story to another, being able to get more information about something that is
being presented in an originally small format, that's a very powerful tool
for narrative.
MediaChannel: Did you learn anything new here today?
Arzie Harden, Vice President, Urban Box Office.:
No, it just kind of reaffirmed some things that I was thinking about for a
while already. But one good thing is that a lot of the people coming from old
media, which also has along with it old way[s] of thinking, [a] gatekeeper
mentality, they are starting to come to realize: Okay, you know this change
that we've been talking about, it's not something that's fictitious, it's
actually happening. So, we need to start thinking about how we are going to
react to that. Which is almost like night and day, compared to what it was
three or four years ago, where they weren't even interested in hearing any
kind of notion. But the fact that you have these kinds of guys at conferences
like they are today, actually talking about this and discussing it, at least
lets you know that they are starting to think about it. And that's actually
the first part that relates to things that change.
Michael Wolff, columnist and author:
I'm learning all kinds of things. I think it's very
interesting to see willingness, the interest on the part of old media players
to step into this business.
James Goldman, CEO, VelocidadInternet.com:
I don't think this conference enabled people to get deep enough to learn very
much. I think it was mainly a chance for people to network and find out other
players in this space. As it relates to media, I [would like to have
seen] more concentration in something more specific, like in uniting people
who might have specific content or distribution interests. This was a very
broad sweep, crossing all areas of finance, theory, strategy, and it took a
little bit of everything.
|
