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Every writer I know who’s worth a damn spends way more time “losing” than “winning”—if success means typing a polished page that lands in print as is. Scriveners tend to arrive at good work through revision. Look at Yeats’s chopped-up fixes in facsimile form, or Ezra Pound’s swashbuckling edits of Eliot’s Waste Land. Without radical overhaul, those works might have sunk like stones.
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr
But as the Apple and HBO business models demonstrate, there was one important way that the world of digital media was the same as the old, analog media world: there was still a great advantage to be had in control. In the old media world, you could control one of two things: the method of distribution of the content or the content itself (or in some cases both). Broadcast networks like NBC and CBS controlled their networks and also developed exclusive content such as TV shows, sports events, and news broadcasts. Studios like Warner and Disney created movies and shows. In the new digital media world, broadcast networks and studios would lose their control on distribution, to be replaced by applications on internet-connected devices. As time went on, we realized that Amazon Video On Demand was stuck in the middle of the value chain—the valley, really. We didn’t control the upstream end of content development. We didn’t control the downstream end of playback devices. We were essentially a digital distribution system, with nothing unique or proprietary about it. No wonder we kept slamming into barriers on both ends of the value chain—content development and distribution on devices.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Over radio, fear had fed on fear; everyone had wanted a happy ending, and when eventually it did end, the best possible construction was put upon the agreement. Chamberlain was the hero of the hour, as much in America as in Britain. It took a while for people to realize that he was a weak old man who had sold out a resolute and embattled ally for a worthless Hitler promise. Churchill knew it, and said, “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.” Roosevelt knew it; to his ambassador in Portugal he wrote, “The dictator threat from Europe is a good deal closer to the United States.” Murrow and Shirer knew it. Meeting in Paris, they agreed that war was likely after next year’s harvest. And H. V. Kaltenborn knew it; even before Chamberlain’s visit to Berchtesgaden he said, “My own feeling is that it will be little more than a truce. There is grave doubt as to whether or not the visit will bring peace.”
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
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