Friends in high places…

Some unexpected praise this week from an unusually elevated source. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, giving the 2010 Hugh Cudlipp lecture, singled out Bookarmy as a ‘digital disrupter’: covering its niche “with a conviction, range, depth and passion that a portmanteau print-based newspaper cannot match”.

A big surprise, and a real shot in the arm for all involved. Even if we were wheeled out as a threat to our own sister companies…

Bookarmy is a rather clever site – completely free – where, once you’ve registered, you can share your passion for books with thousands of others. You can join forums around types of books, or individual books. You can have virtual discussions with authors, link your reading group to others, publish your own reviews and so on. Apart from the authors themselves, there are no “authority” figures here.

Compare it with, say the Times books pages. Here the reverse is true: the emphasis is on “expert” reviews by critics, with not much interest in what you might have to say about a particular book. There is a kind of book group, but you would have to say that interactivity is not the feature it most promotes…

…BookArmy is a telling illustration of two aspects of the digital world.

- One is the ability of digital disrupters (in this case, even within the same company) to take one bit of a newspaper and do it with a conviction, range, depth and passion that a portmanteau print-based newspaper cannot match, especially in digital form. It is the unbundling of newspapers.

- And the second is the only hope of matching the power of the these digital disrupters is to harness the same energy and technologies which they are using.

The lecture is a rather good summary of the current (and future) state of journalism: you can read it all on the Guardian site…

February 7, 2010 | Filed Under Digital Media Business 

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One Response to “Friends in high places…”

  1. Two BBC Radio Interviews about authonomy.com : Mark Johnson on April 5th, 2010 1:34 pm

    [...] on from Alan Rusbridger’s recent praise of bookarmy.com, my other project, writers’ site authonomy.com, has been enjoying a real [...]

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