The Great Discontent has a great interview with designer, editor, and publisher Mandy Brown. The entire interview is great but I really enjoyed this part about working on something bigger than yourself:

There’s a book by Alain De Botton called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. It talks mostly about the sorrows of work. People say horrible things about what their work is like. Something that stuck with me was this story about a biscuit-making company. A biscuit is a really easy thing to make. A single person or a couple of people could make a batch of biscuits to give to other people and experience that whole creation: what they made, what went into it, and the reward of giving it to somebody else. Making food for someone else is a very basic human act.

But, if you take what should be a complete experience and break it into a million pieces and give each person a tiny part of that process, the whole meaning of it is lost. It’s not just that each person is doing something repetitive and dull; what’s worse is that now that person can’t see their place in the whole anymore. They can’t look at the biscuits at the end of the day and say they played a part in it because it’s been so obstructed. I think there’s something naturally human and rewarding about making things, being part of something, and seeing your role in it. I think everyone needs that.

Sometimes I wish there was a script I could plug in that would automatically link to new articles posted by certain writers. Mandy Brown of A Working Library is one of those writers. Everything is pure gold and her most recent post discussing the state of journalism, news, The New York Times, and paywalls is simply brilliant:

[T]he Times paywall does not map to my reading behavior. I don’t read a single source for the news—I read thousands. I consume the news from all directions—from venerable institutions like the Times, to blogs that obsess over particular topics, to tweets from witnesses, and every imaginable source in between. I want news that is the aggregate of all these sources, that admits all of these varying (and often contrary) perspectives. Erecting paywalls between these locations misunderstands the ecosystem that each story participates in. The value I find in the news today is in its connectedness—in the ways in which often divergent sources come together to create a story—not its solitary authority.

This is a fascinating insight that I had not considered when thinking about why the paywall rubbed me the wrong way. Like many others, I was concerned about the general complication and confusion about the setup and pricing structure as well the fact that it’s hard when something that was free gets taken away. I don’t want to pay for something I got for free for so long.

But this idea of the connected story? This was new to me, yet in retrospect feels completely obvious. It started seven years ago when I set up my first RSS reader and started compiling the sites I visited each day. The way I got my news, in that moment, changed and it’s only deepened since. The Times wants me to pay because they think they will be my number one, go-to source, except that’s not the kind of world we live in anymore.

So what does this new world of news look like? It looks like Instapaper, or Readability, or perhaps Flipboard, if Flipboard can learn how to aggregate information in a way that makes sense. It looks like 1-Click, or Kickstarter, or Amazon’s singles. It looks like tools for making timelines or managing primary sources. It looks like dispatches from people on the ground. It looks like startups we haven’t seen yet, because a few smart people (perhaps exiles from newsroom layoffs) are right at this moment looking at the reactions to the Times and starting to plan for how they can do better. It’s both dispersed and connected, social but not inane, reliable and diverse. It looks like many things, because there isn’t going to be a single way forward; the future is, as ever, more complicated than the past.

So what is the future of news consumption? It’s incredibly personal, customized to each consumer yet, in the same breath, it’s beautifully connected, allowing us to see the larger stories unfolding around us.

Mandy Brown on a web designed for reading from the Readabilty blog.

[P]eople do read online. They read more than they ever did. They even read long articles, and straight to the end. They read one article after the other. They crave reading in the quiet moments of the day—waiting in line for coffee, riding the bus, enjoying a glass of wine before their date arrives at the bar. They read while walking down the street; they read at their desk in between tasks; they buy devices that permit them to carry more words than they ever could before—and with those devices in hand they read more and more.

Who says this isn’t an exciting era for the written word? What’s interesting is that the web, at its core, is designed for quick consumption, not long-form journalism. But we don’t have to choose between one or the other, between the longer, thoughtful pieces and the shorter, ad-driven sites. The web’s big enough for all of it.

Lois Beckett reports on Gerald Marzorati, former editor for New York Times Magazine and his thoughts on long-form journalism online:

We have metrics at The New York Times that show that people absolutely click the 23 clicks through to the end of the story. When I was at the magazine, the longest pieces in the magazine were the best-read, the most-read, the most-emailed. The pieces also tended to be, at the end of the year, the pieces that got the most pageviews of anything the Times ran…. People figured out their own sorts of behavior. They printed out the story — on the subway, you would see a printed-out version. Or Instapaper. People are reading these things, and they still become conversation pieces. I don’t know how many of you read Larry Wright’s [New Yorker] piece on Scientology, but a lot of people have read that piece…. [That] you can comment on them, you can blog about them, actually brings more readers to these long-form pieces.

The future is exciting. It’s like Gutenberg all over again.

(And, for the record, that Scientology piece Marzorati mentions is worth reading. One of my favorite things I’ve read online recently.)

Mandy Brown, of A Working Library, on the difference between ebooks and blogs:

Where the blog suggests paths, the book draws conclusions. Neither is superior to the other; rather, they represent different modes of writing—the first expansive, the latter convergent. Each mode suggests and learns from the other. And this is why, even if the form of the book perishes, the writing therein may survive—even if it happens on a blog.

Mandy has been killing it on her blog recently. If you are at all interested in books, writing, editing, publishing and the design of all these things, A Working Library is a must read.