Friday B.S.: 100 Words • Posted 05/23/08

I scrapped the article I was writing for today because I had one of those moments. The moment goes something like this. Writing, writing, writing. Stop. Think, "What the hell am I writing about anyway?" Sometimes an article idea sounds good conceptually but then you get into it and you're like, who the hell is going to read this?

The article started out with the notion that technology is less useful the more advanced it gets. My example is the portable book reader, notably Amazon's highly touted Kindle. For $300 plus you can get a handheld device that stores your newspaper subscriptions, fiction novels and magazine articles and browse through them no different than you would flip the pages of a print book. I concluded that I'm not sure I get the appeal.

Given the rising costs of paper, printing and distribution, there are certainly benefits to the publisher to deliver books electronically and eliminate two of those three major costs (and I guess there is a strong presumption that a download distribution is more cost effective than shipping books to Borders locations.) But where is the benefit to the consumer? The way cell phones have become pdas and web browsers, is it really that much of a stretch to make them work as portable book readers too? Why would anyone want to own yet another handheld device?

I just summarized in 100 words what I was going to say in 500 and I feel way better for it. And I feel reasonably assured that I wasted the least amount of your time as possible. So I scrapped the article with the quippy headline "The Kindle fails to Light My Fire" and plan to start over next week.

As a writer who cranks out an article a week, it's a difficult decision to ditch a topic that's not working. On the one hand, who wants to read it? On the other hand, most writers would then feel compelled to come up with another topic to replace it, usually on a tighter deadline and with some trepidation of writing something even less engaging or not have anything to turn in at all.

Many publications, of course, will go with an article even when it starts to sag in the middle. The justification is easier if you are news outlet that has a dozen lead stories and readers can somewhat pick and choose between the ones that are well-written and interesting, the ones that are just well-written and the ones that are just interesting. And it would be great (there again depends on the publication) if you could just...cancel the ones that were neither. Having spent hours a day trolling sites like cnn.com, espn.com and perezhilton.com, I can tell you definitively no such editorial trimming exists.

For blogs though canceling a weekly column does have ramifications. I have the luxury of publishing on any schedule I like, but readership (all two of you) comes to anticipate the routine of a weekly Friday column. What's worse then? Publishing a column of lesser quality or not publishing at all?

For this week, at least, I opted for a compromise. Here's an article that you apparently decided to read to the end (yeah, sorry about that.) The original concept was rightfully ditched but I still cranked out my 500 word article about nothing. In other words, welcome to Friday B.S. We know exactly how you feel.