If porn can still make money, there’s hope

Pornography, if you believe the media theorists, have been leading the charge in innovation in media. It was the deciding factor between the VHS vs Beta war, the pioneer in creating anonymity on the Web and was one of the first successful business models on the Web. It comes to little wonder, then, that media watchers are looking to the porn industry in monetizing content that’s so easily shared. Or pirated, depending on your point of view.

To set a background at what the porn industry (damn, I’m going to get so much bot-spam for this post) is facing: A study by Envisional, on behalf of NBC Universal, revealed that pornography was the most shared content on BitTorrent at 35.8%, followed closely by movies at 35.2%.

Reading Stephen King

I’ve had this sudden urge to dive into Stephen King novels of late, mostly because of two reasons: I’m shamelessly supportive of most populist works — be it pop music or pop literature — and secondly, I give into hype and recommendation blurbs easily (“He’s a national treasure”  is my “You got me at hello” Jerry McGuire line).

I suspect that if I should ever get caught and manipulated by the good-cop-bad-cop routine, I’m likely to confess state secrets, childhood fantasies, and my inexplicable crush on Helen Hunt within five minutes.

To date, I’ve only read two entire Stephen King books — On Writing and Just After Sunset — and currently going through his latest one Full Dark, No Stars. It wasn’t until I read On Writing, a non-fiction autobiography that details King’s writing process, that I finally understood where his stories come from, and why Esquire justifiably names him “America’s Greatest Storyteller”.

Magazines: Meh.

“I don’t want to work in the mag line again,” said one former mag editor whom I randomly bumped into in a cafe. Sadly, she’s not alone in her opinion — the sighs and groans of the magazine editor here are getting louder, and the skepticism seems part and parcel of most people who’ve worked the magazine line since the early 2000s.

Being a former magazine editor myself, I can’t blame them. The media landscape has shifted tremendously thanks to the Web, and the romance, magic, and influence of being the editor of your own goddamn magazine is fading away. When I’d just joined in the magazine line with KLue, the world of magazines were still mystical, the curtain that hides the Wizard still thick and opaque. A writer’s byline was tied in with a certain expectation of wit, controversy and prose.