Dave Eggers: Still Not The Real Enemy!

I am merely going to note the volume at which I exclaimed “Oh my GOD” while reading this Onion interview with Dave Eggers, regarding his publication, the San Francisco Panorama. (Earlier, we published some speculation and suppositions regarding that one-time paper’s own business model-by the way, since then, we’ve heard that many people who worked on it were not paid at all.)

• To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise. * [Um, also, ads.]

• We’ve lost that very simple transaction that’s so pure, where a reader can say, “I support what you’re doing, here’s my dollar. I know that you guys are gonna be watchdogs or keep the government accountable, so here’s my 50-cent contribution each day. ** [Nostalgia renders the past unrecognizable.]

• Instead of running a wire story about Afghanistan, we knew a guy going to Afghanistan, J. Malcolm Garcia, and we said, “Okay, send us something when you’re done.” And he sent us something, and it doesn’t even cost that much, because he was going anyway. ******** [Screams]

• I think there’s great value to the Associated Press and to Reuters, too, but if you wanted to generate original content, maybe written by local writers, it just takes a little bit of openness to open your pages up to a wider freelance writer pool, and then you might find new voices and a wider array of voices, and definitely more original content that can’t be found anywhere else. All that wire stuff, that’s free, and I don’t think you’re gonna put that genie back in the bottle. ** [??? Actually the AP does this thing where they charge people to run their stories?]

• My respect for everyone that works at every daily, especially those that send it off at night, is just through the roof, because if they have four or five errors a day, it’s pretty remarkable, given how many moving parts there are. [This is a very good point and nicely made!]

• The paper-based media really has to work within a rational scale, and if they do, they’ll be fine. There’s plenty of room, people really care, there are magazines that people will fight to hold onto. You might not be able to operate your own LearJet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it’s a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist. [A totally excellent point, very well put!]