Converging on Amateurs

Some interesting crosscurrents in journalism and publishing, displayed neatly in two recent articles. One from Demo highlights Blurb.com, which does on-demand print publishing, and has a nice little bookstore from which to sell these print books to other customers on the web. Their newest feature makes it easy to move Flickr content into print. Mark Bowden writes on Publishing2 about newspapers struggling to move beyond "filming a play" to collaborative work with citizen journalists and online multimedia presentations while their businesses can still support a staff to learn it.

This is a good time to revisit William Buckeley's 2006 WSJ article, "The Internet Allows Customers to Trim Wasteful Purchases"

When customers find a way to avoid buying the excess baggage, they change quickly.

UPDATE: The recent Tools of Change for Publishing conference is summarized here.