March 15, 2010
LA Times Covers SXSW “New Publishing” Panel & The Amanda Project
Peter Miller from the LA Times’ “Jacket Copy” has a great write-up of our SXSW Interactive “New Publishing & Web Content” panel:
“…It was nice, then, to end the day with a panel of publishing experts who were neither reactionaries nor doom-sayers. The centerpiece of the New Publishing and Web Content panel was the Amanda Project from Fourth Story Media. An experiment in bridging the best aspects of Web and print, the site invites young women to contribute to an ongoing book series about a character named Amanda.
The project doesn’t spell out the end of traditional book publishing as much as demonstrate another avenue. Lisa Holton, whose tenure in publishing often crossed over into new media, suggested that we should all take a step back from bashing publishers simply because they can’t turn on a dime. Holton and her co-panelists (including Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman) pointed out that the publishing process may seem unwieldy and redundant from the sidelines, but it holds tremendous intrinsic value beyond nostalgia. The world hasn’t necessarily passed publishing by, it just has created multiple new intersecting markets. What’s wrong with that?
In nearly any discussion of books these days, the argument usually devolves into either/or. Either the publishers get with the program or else. That “or else” can be a monotonous drum beat at SXSWi that drowns out genuine dialog. But for a moment, it felt in the convention center as if the attendees forgot what the program was or how it might be implemented. It felt like, briefly, all was forgiven.”
Read the full piece here.
March 11, 2010
We’re big fans of SXSW Interactive here at Fourth Story Media, and this year we thought that in addition to attending the festivities, and sitting on a panel, we’d try out a little storytelling experiment…
Starting this Friday, March 12th at 10 AM central time, we’ll be hosting an interactive storytelling exquisite corpse-esque competition over at The Future of the Story. How it works:
- Follow us on Twitter to receive the kickoff sentence for each story (contributed by some of your favorite web storytellers)
- @ reply to @itwasadarkand with what you think happens next; your sentence will show up here
- Vote up the best sentence
- Every round, the winning sentence becomes part of the story and it’s time to write the next!
Once each story closes, we’ll be adding it to our story archive where it will be given a title and illustrated by Figure-1. AND (just to make things super extra saucy fun) we’ll be choosing one contributor from each story at random to win a choice of radtastic books (either Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More, or Jeffrey Zeldman’s A Book Apart), AND the original, signed illustration that accompanied their story!
Anyone and everyone is invited to play. We’ll be starting things off easy with two stories on Friday (new lines added approximately every 30 minutes, second story up around 4 PM), and we’ll ramp up from there depending on how feverishly you type. If you’re at
SXSW, be sure to look for our buttons inside of your Big Bags, and watch for FSM’s
Lisa Holton and
Erin Kissane handing out our limited edition totes (both pictured here). Whoohoo! UPDATE:
The first story “Bearly Noir” is complete! Read it now.
Read all of the finished stories!
March 10, 2010
Are you heading to the always invigorating SXSW Interactive this year? Are you obsessed with the future of publishing? Storytelling? Print media? Digital media? Writing? Reading? Words? Awesomeness? Be sure to check out New Publishing & Web Content on Saturday March 13th @ 5PM CT in Ballroom A. Hosted by Happy Cog’s Jeffrey Zeldman, the panel will “explore the creative, strategic, and marketing challenges of traditional and new (internet hybrid) book publishing and online magazine publishing, and how these fields intersect with content strategy and client services.”
Fantastic (if we do say so ourselves) panelists include:
- Lisa Holton – CEO + Founder, FSM
- Erin Kissane – Web Project + Community Manager, FSM / Blogger, Incisive.nu
- Mandy Brown – Creative Director, Etsy
- Paul Ford – Novelist / Blogger, FTrain.com / Editor, Harper’s
Hope to see you there!