A Glance in the Rear View Mirror
Here are just a very few of the reading, writing and publishing stories that made news in 2009:
- Kindle DX
Amazon.com says sales of its Kindle e-book reader are astronomical…but doesn’t provide any data to back up their claim. Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble released a competitor, the Nook, and Sony has its own line of readers.
On a similar note, top business and motivational author Stephen Covey moved the e-book rights for “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Principle-Centered Leadership” from traditional book publisher Simon & Schuster to Amazon.com.
- Carl Jung
Carl Jung’s mysterious “Red Book,” a long-hidden, leather bound tome containing illuminations and calligraphy that reveal the inner workings of the famous psychologist’s mind, was published in October.More than 15,000 people in the newspaper industry lost their jobs in 2009, according the blog News Cycle.
The 108-year-old Editor and Publisher, the #1 journal covering the newspaper industry, announced it would stop publishing. Or will it?
Facebook announced in September that it had a cash-flow positive second quarter and had signed up its 300 millionth user.
Twitter, the super-popular form of mini-communication made famous by Ashton Kutcher and pro athletes, has stopped growing.
Walter Cronkite, the long-tenured CBS news anchor famous for his emotional coverage of the JFK assassination and his signature sign-off, died in July.
Twitter proved invaluable in the effort to report on the protests in Iran over the summer after the Tehran government shuts down official media sites.
Tehran scene
Self-publishing grew in 2009, with at least one New York Times bestseller starting out as a self-published book. Similarly, venerable Getty Images has turned to the amateur image hosting site Flickr to help dig up new and exciting photographs and other images with its Flickr Collection.
A study in the UK determined that sending text messages while driving a vehicle is more dangerous than driving drunk.
The US Postal Service, socked with a double whammy of recession and increased use of e-mail, lost $3.8 billion last fiscal year and faces even more challenges ahead.
And here at TPS, we published over 100 articles in print and online publications, wrote a marketing column for a leading B2B magazine and helped three clients complete the writing and editing of their books. Happy New Year to you and yours!
It’s a Small, Small World
The British Empire
Did you know that English is spoken as an official language in more than 80 countries, territories and dependencies? Moreover, it is spoken unofficially by nearly everyone in at least two others: the United States and Australia? Add in the many countries in which a large portion of the population speaks English, such as France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, and the countries in which English is spoken for business or political purposes, such as China and Japan, and you can’t help but realize the breadth and depth of the English language around the globe.
This is nothing new, and it reflects the impact of hundreds of years of British colonialism and the global impact of post-World War II American economics and culture. What is new, however, is the Internet. Suddenly, the nearly one billion speakers of English around the globe have access to each other’s newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs, Facebook pages—in short, they can truly tap into the global consciousness of English speakers.
The impact of spoken English clearly has tremendous impact for written communication as well, especially for companies doing business in emerging economies. The potential for miscommunication and misunderstandings is greater than ever before. Slights and unintended insults that may never have had legs 15 years ago will now likely travel the globe in minutes.
Consider this small example that materialized as a result of an opinion column written by New 
York Times columnist George Vecsey on allegations of football recruiting violations committed by the University of Tennessee. In the column, Vecsey poked a little fun at southern culture, with lines like “If you’re ever in the neighborhood, y’all come see us, y’heah?”
In the pre-Internet era, this column may have gone largely unnoticed, even though it was in the New York Times. But in 2009, Vecsey’s column created a minor blowup in the blogosphere, generating this response from east Tennessee journalist Ben Garrett and this follow-up from southwest Virginia journalist Dan Smith, among others. Smith, a career newspaperman and member of the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame, whose members include Roger Mudd, Ann Compton, and James J. Kilpatrick, called Vecsey “a Yankee newspaperman too lazy to do his homework and too steeped in redneck, inbred stereotypes” and said that Vecsey’s column was “mostly wrong, mostly bigoted, mostly shows his uninformed a** to the rest of the world.”
Yikes. Especially that “rest of the world” part.
The lesson here is for writers: consider the audience. In our electronic age, audiences may be far wider than the primary readership an author intended. A gaffe poking fun at a foreign culture, committed by a careless company spokesperson, could cost millions in lost sales, have a negative impact in vital emerging markets, cause irreparable damage to the company brand, and even generate international political ramifications. Remember, the written word carries a big stick!