Steal My Ideas, Please

The other day my daughter, or someone she was reading, likened the future of newspapers to the fate of milkmen. They couldn’t imagine the service would fade away, but it did. Radio dramas were once popular, too, but they’re now a relic too.
But in these examples is kind of buried a lesson for newspapers: Don’t confuse […]

I’m writing this on an Acer mini netbook I recently bought. Love its portability (2 lbs!) and affordable price ($350). Screen’s glarey in sunlight, but keyboard’s big enough for even my large paws. Anyway, for even more portability, why not invent the CompuSleeve? suggests a friend, Danielle Comisky. It’s a touch-screen computer that curls around your […]

Fiction tends to fall into two camps (or so I think): serious lit and fantasy/action/adventure, which includes mysteries. Romance is probably a third. But why is it you don’t see much popular fiction that’s just fun, like TV? Kind of like Two and a Half Men in print? Or Rocky and Bullwinkle? Or a Saturday […]

Who says celebs are truly interesting? Why not a book chronicling the struggles and wild lives of wannabes and gonnabes?

If celeb baby news is beaucoup bucks (People mag paid millions for pics of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s newbie, Shiloh), well, celebrity baby publishing is bound to become its own industry. People begat Teen People, so why not Baby People? Babies are people, too, after all. And plenty of advertisers are out to Pamper […]

Imagine every day your newspaper had on its front page a little box labeled “Know News.” In that box, you’d find a single timely word, term or name with a simple definition. Could be old: Arraignment. Concerto. Insurgency. Or relatively new: Stem cells. Keylogging. Podcast.
Finish with a quick teaser or page number to a story […]

OK, this is basically a packaging concept based on a pun. Megatrends was a fascinating bestseller that forecast the future and spawned a set of sequels. Being more of a pessimist than is healthy (and always a prankster), I thought: Why not Negatrends, a gathering of gloom-and-doom scenarios into one book? Global warming. Emergent diseases. […]