The Koufax Question
For we to proceed with the Koufax Awards, second series, we need to be doing more than attempting to recreate what existed when Dwight Meredith began the Koufax Awards, as those halcyon days of a broad, cooperating community of writers, is gone.
Rather than try to re-create what we enjoyed for several years, and failed to keep, we should try for something we can create. Something that hasn't been co-opted, yet, and perhaps can be retained for as long, or longer. After all, once burned and all that.
The debate with the print media is over. They're going online. The debate with the A listers is over too. They're going corporate. A marriage made in heaven.
Video blogging hasn't caught on, and podcasting is less than the original promise, but that may be simply that we haven't figured out how the mesh of co-reading-and-linking writers -- what works in the real blogosphere -- mutates as streaming media sources, to form meshes of co-listening-and-linking streams. The CurrentTV model seems as close as anyone's gotten so far to "user contributed content", and even so, that's still far from what we had, and to a lesser extent, still have, in the text-and-link media blogosphere.
So what would be transformational? What would be worth the effort, not just the effort of conducting the Koufax process, and that's actually real work and both Dwight and MB have burned out on the work, but also the work of nominating, reading, linking, revisiting, rereading, writing graciously to readers, linking, revisiting and rereading, writing graciously about semi-finalists, and then finalists, which of necessity, means writing about someone else's work being a finalist for an award, that is, the work of believing that winning an award is less than the awards themselves -- the awards the writers, commenters and readers of the blogosphere give to each other.
I want to go for the brass ring.
I want Susie Madrake and David Neiwort and Marcy Wheeler and Melissa McEwan and Juan Cole and PZ Myers and Riverbend and ... to get the same kind of deal that Annie Lennox and Billy Bragg and Howard Jones and Kate Nash and Josh Weller and ... seek through the FAC.
... We want all artists to have more control of their music and a much fairer share of the profits it generates in the digital age. We speak with one voice to help artists strike a new bargain with record companies, digital distributors and others, and are campaigning for specific changes ...
Our IPR. Our DRM.
So here are my suggestions:
- The Koufax Awards work should result in paid work for the people doing the scut work, as it has in the past, and
- The Koufax Awards work should result in bloggers having more control of their content and a much fairer share of the profits it generates, new in the 2nd series.
And Single Payer.
Read A Manifesto for Fair Play in the Digital Age. They are us.
Discuss.
Comments
Should be "For us to proceed...." Object of the preposition "for" OR subject of the infinitive "to proceed" -- either takes the objective case. Grammar isn't insignificant. The troublesome ambiguity of the Second Amendment resides in the absolute phrase, the ablative absolute in Latin.
[if you're inviting dwight, mb, and i -- the "we" (and few) to taos to do the work, fine. if you're suggesting that someone else is doing that work, ah, well. As to grammar... while we write in English with comfort, two of wampum's authors have another grammatical context, and we infrequently code-switch into a vocabulary of common Algonquin, and in that grammar, the distinction between plurals in which the speaker or listener is included, and plurals in which the speaker or listener is not included, exists, along with other fundamental differences such as active and inactive gender, and animate and inanimate number.
But thanks for bothering to comment, if only on the first four words. ebw]
Posted by: Jim | September 27, 2009 08:52 PM
here's a suggestion -- rather than have it be about "voting", have the awards be juried, like the Cannes Film Festival.
[implementation details please. ebw]
Posted by: paul lukasiak | September 28, 2009 10:43 AM
David Neiwort -> David Neiwert
[don't tell jim, and now i have to both make a correction and refund all the salmon and muktuk i took from david and sally and turn in my xtian identity movement decoder ring. bah! ebw]
Posted by: lambert strether | September 28, 2009 10:46 AM
And then there's this.
I keep returning to this post because I think it's very important. How do we "try for something we can create"? ("If you can keep it").
* * *
Susie Madrake ->Susie Madrak.
Posted by: lambert strether | September 29, 2009 08:45 AM
I have pretty unlimited control of my work. I assume no one gives me money for it because, y'know, they haven't got the money to spare. There's a lot of that going around. But broke people deserve to be able to read the news, too.
Posted by: Avedon | September 30, 2009 05:43 PM