This belief that online is ‘free’, that it doesn’t take anyone’s paid writing job away or stifle anyone’s voice – while unspoken and in most respects probably true – needs to be measured against the crisis of magazines and of formally-edited selections of content more generally.

The current Meanland blogger is hanging up her spurs so that cutting-edge collaboration between Overland and Meanjin is looking for a blogger. Well, actually, two bloggers. We’re holding a competition to find two bloggers to write fortnightly for the Meanland project. The winners will receive a one-off prize of $200, and be paid $75 per […]

Last night I had the fortune to hear writer Simmone Howell talk about her novels, writing processes and her brief spell as a publisher. Vandal Press, co-founded by Howell during her days in RMIT’s Professional Writing and Editing course, ran from the late 90s to 2002. Howell described scribbling short stories in one class, working […]

My name is Mark William Jackson and I was a compulsive blogger. It has been eight weeks since my last post. At my worst I would spend up to two hours per evening posting, responding to comments and checking statistics. If I wasn’t in my dashboard I was checking my email to see if anyone […]

Although we may not always recognise our bondage, we live, in modern times, under a tyranny of numbers – (paraphrasing) Nicholas Eberstadt Numbers are appealing. They equate to fact and accuracy; they help us to interpret the world and its workings. We can dispute the significance of numbers but we can’t dispute they exist, nor […]

Writing for the Internet is not like writing a novel. Seriously, they’re galaxies apart. Writing an essay and writing a blog post aren’t galaxies apart; more like the distance between the nearest open cluster of stars and me. Clearly, I’m referring to non-fiction here, rather than fiction or poetry or experimental writing. I’m not talking […]

Well, not really: just wanted to say that, following those discussions, we have amended what we’re asking in our search for new Overland bloggers. On the one hand, because we can’t pay them, we don’t expect them to contribute on a weekly basis. We’re happy for people to blog whenever they can. On the other, […]

As luck would have it, we’ve sent out a call for people to blog at Overland just as a controversy has developed over the ABC Book Show doing more-or-less the same thing. The arts industry’s reliance upon free labour is a fraught issue; what follows is an attempt to think the implications of what we’re […]

Margaret Simons has an interesting piece about how much  blogging has changed journalists’ perception of their work. Paul Bradshaw says this of his survey: As I pored over the results, I was surprised at just how much these journalists felt their work had been changed by the simple act of blogging. I had expected some […]