The Friday night bash at Whym diner drew a really great crowd – lots of smart, interesting people showed up to mix and mingle. I don’t sleep on planes, so it still feels like the same day to me, but I know it’s actually Saturday.
Last night someone said to me that newspapers could have avoided their current fate by not ever putting any content online.
That’s a nice fantasy. Someone was going to do it. All that would have happened to newspapers if they hadn’t put content online is that they’d be hurting a lot more, because nobody would be reading them online, either.
It’s tempting to thing that progress can be avoided, but if the lessons of history teach us anything, it’s that any significantly more efficient technology will effect its own change, regardless of how many people want to ignore it.
I recently read a book called The Big Switch, by Nick Carr, where he draws some very good parallels between the proliferation of broadband internet and the proliferation of electricity.
The same forces exist in our society to push along all new technologies. The advantages of publishing online are so obvious that it’s inevitably the future of the industry, and it’s dangerous to think that if only the major newspapers wouldn’t do it, nobody else would.
It’s a bad idea to fight progress. You will always lose.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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