The publishing industry has never been a convincing example of sound business logic. Even before a page is printed, vast amounts of time and sums of money are spent without any guarantee that anyone will like – much less buy – the eventual product. For decades, the model was accepted as a happy marriage between art and commerce. But something happened in the 1960s that began a transformation of the book publishing business: the industry was bought up bit-by-bit by conglomerate media corporations and the economic imperatives of the global free market encroached on the trade, imposing alien business norms.

Last year Margaret Simons wrote on Crikey about the inconsistencies in payments for freelance writers working in the Australian media. The data she collected from freelancers led her to conclude that securing a fair price for work ‘seems to depend on who you deal with, and how you deal with them.’

Picking up where I left off… though not with Nicholas Carr (at least, not immediately). At the Wheeler Centre’s weekly lunchtime soapbox event Anna Krien addressed the question of whether newspapers still matter in the digital era. Krien’s central argument was that print newspapers needed to recognise and mobilise the features that make them unique […]