Philobiblon

Now here’s some depressing news …

Two Booker novels, submitted anonymously and unidentified to publishers and agents, got almost universal rejections. As someone who refers to JK Rowling getting six rejections just a little too often, I’m not surprised.

Then, if you’re suffering from New Year-itis you mightn’t want to read this one: if you’re British you probably noticed that story about the single mother of five who died by “falling out of the loft while getting her children’s presents”. You have to wonder why that story was allowed to run in that form (surely an off-the-record word from a policeman would have stopped it … then again perhaps not, given the desperation for a story), because it looks like it is much darker – a case of suicide.

Then, one of my predictions for 2006 – we’ll see a lot more attacks from the “old” media on the “new”, like this:

There’s something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the Blogosphere — the big-bang “electroniverse,” where recently wired squatters set up new camps each day. As I write, the number of “blogs” (Web logs) and “bloggers” (those who blog) is estimated in the tens of millions worldwide.
Although I’ve been a blog fan since the beginning, and have written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new “citizen journalist,” I’m also wary of power untempered by restraint and accountability.
Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its own members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.

Well except in sentimental, and unfactual, Christmas stories …