Hard News: Killing Volume
39 Responses
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Russell Brown, in reply to
is that the Furtive Paul Rose?
I believe so! Welcome to the club, Paul!
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[Sorry Graham -- had to delete Keith Hunter's letter from this comment.
This isn't an appropriate place to paste in something so long, off-topic and legally delicate. I'm interested in what Keith is doing, but I'm thinking about how I handle this overnight.
Cheers,
RB] -
John Russell, in reply to
There's a simple aesthetic pleasure about the tactile and olfactory experience of dead trees in hand that no amount or gadgetry can ever match.
Replace "dead trees" with "vinyl records" here, and this is exactly the sort of response I was speaking of earlier when I talked about niche markets.
Secondly, gadgets break, power goes out, batteries go flat. Those who are now dependent on all the fancy new technology are setting themselves up for a hell of a shock. High tech is good, but sometimes old tech and low tech are best tech.
It is true that when society collapses and we regress to a hunter/gatherer pseudo-civilisation, I am going to find it quite difficult to read even the Project Gutenberg collection.
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
I don't believe that a computer is the end-all for media consumption
Ok, so I was exaggerating for effect. (Having just got a Kindle I think I'll be buying real books for a while yet).
But I don't think it's really disputed that magazine revenues (sales/advertising) have been suffering, and that the younger end of the market (which I don't fit into) have the most alternative calls on their eyeballs.
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Graham Dunster, in reply to
Righto. Makes a change from the Banks circus.
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nzlemming, in reply to
I'm thinking about how I handle this overnight.
I can't be the only one looking forward to the morning, then ;-)
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Mayed in New Zealand...
..looking forward to the morning...
and in the afternoon of May the 1st those of us who are in Chchch can attend the NZ Music Month launch - 5.30pm at the Rakaia Centre, at Chchch Polytech (Madras st)
The Chchch libraries as always have an extensive series of events.
for other events round the country check out the NZ Music month site. -
Simon Grigg, in reply to
Replace "dead trees" with "vinyl records" here, and this is exactly the sort of response I was speaking of earlier when I talked about niche markets.
Vinyl is the only format with growth in the music market these days. It may be a niche but it's an expanding one. Will it ever become dominant again? No, of course not, but I think vinyl may well survive the dying optical disc formats.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
Ok, so I was exaggerating for effect. (Having just got a Kindle I think I'll be buying real books for a while yet).
Likewise. Happy to buy and read on my Kindle, but then what do you do with the book? I can't give the book away or lend it to someone else to read. Neither am I convinced that the ebook format-wars are over. Sure, I can de-DRM and format-shift using Calibre, but that's still not all that straight-forward.
Besides, I spend nearly all my day in front of a screen one way or another. Picking up a physical book is an escape from that.
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ARGH! I am coming to this story really late but it's really annoying. Being outside AK meant I had no access to Volume other than twitter and FB. I found the Herald page almost like some sort of practical joke!
Well, I hope they make good use of Sam over at Herald entertainment, he is a smart dude. I think Hugh Sundae has done a great job of their online, just awesome, so I guess not all is lost....buuuuuut as a gigging musician I really do think we need street press.
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And what happened with that Homebrew Volume video today? I saw some tweets about someone at the Herald getting fired for being in it? I want to see it!
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From someone who has consulted to APN, I can tell you they have hundreds of journalists, printers and sales people but comparatively few designers, developers or do-ers. That balance is outdated for a modern media corporation.
Also corporation is the word. Those at the top of the pyramid, call the shots and clearly put things out of their misery before applying any lessons. It's not hard to set up a digital presence these days unless your're an old fart who doesn't know a pixel from a peach.
There are some talented people there all they way from content creators to marketing mavens and product people. But they're all kept on a tight leash by the financial book keepers who quickly kill off new ideas and generally yearn for yesterday.
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Steve Withers, in reply to
Same here. I've never heard of "Volume" until today.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
And what happened with that Homebrew Volume video today? I saw some tweets about someone at the Herald getting fired for being in it? I want to see it!
For comedic purposes in the video, Tom opened a NSFW website on an editorial computer. It was momentary and you couldn't really see the screen, but someone in HR found out days after the video went up, freaked out and threatened a longtime editorial staff member, a good guy, with dismissal. Then they started freaking out about the contents of the final issue and it appeared that it might be pulped and never distributed.
A few wiser heads -- think high-up at the Herald -- seem to have succeeded in calming things down and the Home Brew "takeover" issue (which is very funny) did reach the streets, if a little late.
A lot of people at APN at very jumpy at the moment because the company is looking at divesting some of its NZ assets -- and that may have had an impact on the timing of the Volume closure. On the other hand, I get the impression that people there have been very surprised to discover how strong a brand Volume had established in less than a year. APN really should have done a lot better with what it had there.
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