Morning Brief — April 1, 2008

No April Fool’s jokes from moi today, so I’ll just jump right in.

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Kassia Krozser of Booksquare pointed out an interesting piece on Medialoper that talked about maintaining contact lists.  More specifically, the post noted that many writers (and musicians, artists, etc.) have built large fan bases on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.  What if those sites disappeared?  For authors very dependent on their social networking “friends,” they may want to encourage those fans to additionally sign up for mailing lists / newsletters so they have fans’ contact information should the networking sites ever go kaput.

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TechCrunch posted a piece yesterday about traffic on blogs versus traditional media sites.  The writer, Erick Schonfeld, brings up an interesting point, which is that the blogs with the highest traffic, like TechCrunch or CNET.com, have professional staffs, while traditional media sites that have the highest traffic, like the New York Times, have very active blogging staffs — in other words, the sites with the most traffic are really a mix of the old and new worlds.

This raises another issue which is that not all blogs are the same — many blogs are like this one, with one person writing posts.  (This applies to pretty much all the literary blogs.)  Other blogs — often those in the technology and political spheres — like CNET.com or the Huffington Post, are pretty big enterprises, some with with dozens on staff.  Naturally, this will affect how you build a relationship with and pitch a blog / blogger.

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FishBowlNY reports that the editor behind Blackbook will launch a new magazine this fall called Tar.  You can check here for details, although it doesn’t actually say what the magazine is about although it will be glossy, expensive ($20) and eco-friendly …