I’ve long been an advocate of the convergence of print and pixel formats. Each has something to learn from the other, and, despite the insistent claims, the online world will not replace print in a clean sweep any time soon.

Despite the obvious limitations of long text pieces online, there’s yet another outbreak of print-death fever going around. Tim O’Reilly has heard whispers that the San Francisco Chronicle is in “serious trouble” and is laying off journalists and staff. Dave Winer wades in with a thoughtful contribution, while Robert Scoble trumpets, “Newpapers are dead”.

The problem with that kind of headline is that this is a complex situation with many variations and possible outcomes. Certainty is not an option here.

Newspapers have been in trouble as long as they have existed. I can name a dozen national titles that went out of business in Britain in the 20th century. It happens — all the time. One failure doesn’t necessarily signal the end of an industry.

Most UK national newspapers now put their whole output openly on websites. They break news online and follow up in later print issues with in-depth analyses and commentary. They also give away DVDs and lottery cards with the print version and have a sizeable magazine-type feature-set aimed at specific demographics. Not many of their customers want to turn their computers on to access all of that when they can buy it in a convenient print bundle for around a dollar while they’re on the move.

As newspapers become more like daily magazines, with retrospective analysis of news already broken on TV and online, urban populations are still buying print products in large quantities. The evening papers, for example, are bought by returning commuters to make their homeward journey a little more bearable and to catch up on the stories of the day. Local papers are increasingly the glue that binds the inhabitants of towns and villages together.

What is actually happening is a convergence, not a replacement. Increasingly print publishers are becoming digital publishers, while maintaining their print operations. Imagine the major titles — the FT, WSJ, NYT, or Times (London) — without their immensely prestigious paper versions. They would lose considerable traction in the marketplace without them.

We forget at our peril that most people like the reassuring feel of a “real world” product in their hands. They go online for certain types of information, but relax with a book or magazine.

Breaking news is covered better on 24-hour news channels than on websites or blogs. Immediacy is the USP here. Fiction is a pain on-screen. Long, complex, nonfiction is easier to handle in book form, and some subjects are presented far better in print than they are on the internet.

What we’re seeing is a weeding out process that will result in rapidly-changing information migrating online — as it already has — while considered analysis will appear in hybrid formats for different audiences. More reflective, longer-term material and fiction will still remain predominantly the province of print formats and subsequent dramatizations.

It’s often forgotten that new technology has transformed the print world too. On-demand book printing, from disc in tiny batches, is already changing the face of book production and will continue to do so.

Can anyone tell me why a wealthy society shouldn’t support many communications formats to their mutual advantage?

I’m off on a short, sorely needed spring break while things are quiet here and the weather good.

I’ll be spending a few days at the southernmost tip of the British Isles. Clue : it’s in Cornwall. Apart from gazing soulfully at the sea, I’ll be trying to get some traction on my two book projects. Hardly a holiday then.

I’m leaving a few timestamped posts sprinkled around the sites I write. If you’re looking for something to read here, click on “Syntagma’s Top Posts” under Archives in the sidebar.

See you on Monday.

That was a question I was asked in yesterday’s comments. It needed a bigger reply than another comment would allow, so here goes.

Differentiating yourself as a digital publisher can be broken down into five steps :

1. Find a niche that works.
2. Build credibility.
3. Give away a lot — except the inner secrets.
4. Genuinely have inner secrets.
5. Always be exceptional.

#1. Finding a niche that works is harder than you might think. Most of the niches that work are now maxed out with major operators. Therefore a niche that does work may turn out to be a niche that did work, but no longer does.

Take the biggest online niche of all : Making Money Online. This was the first Big Thing on the internet. Remember all those email newsletters and the never ending surge of autoresponder emails urging you to sign up — “hit ‘em seven times to win a customer”? It was all built on affiliate income and the numbers game of playing with percentages.

It seems so dated now, yet the basic principles still work because they resonate with human nature — which changes only very slowly over geological time.

Problogging is the modern equivalent : creating content for Adsense clicks. Again, it’s a numbers game and the niche is important. It’s the old methodology but with a fresh lick of paint for the New Media generation.

To find a niche that works, I apply the TLA test. Some sites (blogs, if you like) sell out on text link ads very quickly. Others, with the same or more traffic don’t. It’s the best indicator I know of whether a niche will work online or not. Try it on 10 ideas, each with a different site. Get PR, submit to the TLA site, stand back and watch the winners and losers. Eliminate the losers.

#2. Building credibility as a writer and publisher is essential if you’re going to sell digital products. That product may be blog posts to attract advertising, or ebooks that sell direct. Let’s concentrate on the ebooks as the blog/Adsense thing has been more than adequately covered.

If you want to sell an ebook that you’re writing yourself, you first have to establish yourself as an author; as a dispenser of accurate information; and as a reliable picker of techniques that no-one else can match.

That’s a tall order, but what did you expect? Only 5 percent of aspirants ever succeed in any enterprise. They do because they have talent — why would you choose to be a digital publisher if you didn’t? And they have grit — they are prepared to stick to the task until they succeed.

You build credibility the slow way, using the old publishers’ dictum : show don’t tell.

Don’t keep telling everyone how wonderful you are — show them. Write something that arrests their attention. Keep writing something that continues to arrest their attention. Nothing else matters but that.

#3. In other words, give away a lot, freely and without flinching. Look at Darren Rowse at Problogger.net. He pours forth his bounty with great abandon every day, and it’s all the product of having actually done the job himself. His readers know that, so they give him the benefit of the doubt and stay attached.

Imagine if Darren released an ebook : The Definitive Problogger — All the Inner Secrets of Making Money Online and From Your Blog. It may only contain what he has written many times before but is now diffused all over his site. But people won’t see it that way. It would sell.

The most recent legend is the 37Signals ebook which took over $30,000 on its first day. They had established their reputation as providers of simple, small-scale software solutions that worked. They had the credibility. They offered access to the inner sanctum.

Giving away a lot of your experience is the only way to establish that kind of credibility. But always keep a little back — what in the publishing trade is known as The Killer Fact.

#4. Inner Secrets or Killer Facts are rarely as potent as they sound. But you must have a few, especially if you give the impression that they’re there in the inner sanctum.

For example, in my forthcoming book, The Syntagma Story, there are 37 killer facts, each one bigger than the one before.

See what I mean, you’re reaching for your credit card before I can get these words onto the screen.

#5. Always be exceptional. Never follow the trend or the crowd.

A farmer I knew once complained that European Union subsidies were useless because once they were announced for a particular crop, every farmer in Western Europe would start growing them, and in two years there would be a massive glut. At that stage the loss from the crop would greatly exceed the cash subsidy.

Think long-term, avoid the Gadarene rush to The Next Big Thing.

* Build credibility.
* Discharge your inner secrets in your commercial products.
* Do a great job.
* Always be exceptional.

The newest crib on the block for Syntagma Digital is the second of Guy Adams’s three new webtitles : The Dark Room - Literary Worlds of Horror, part of our Allusionz network magazine.

Guy Adams is a full-time professional author and writer, as well as being a partner and senior editor in the British publishing company, Humdrumming.

Horror…for many years a fictional genre that has suffered from a less than sterling reputation.

If ever an argument against over-exposure exists in fiction writing then Horror is the perfect example. For hundreds of years writing about the darker things in life (both real and supernatural) was considered a rich and healthy pastime. Shakespeare was no stranger to the Grand Guignol of storytelling, Dickens was a sap for the ghostly tale…a glance at a school syllabus will see old staples as Stoker and Shelley deemed perfectly valid ‘classics’.

Also watch out for Guy’s The Hack’s Progress, which will be up and scribbling next week.

Read The Dark Room.

In previous posts I’ve looked at creating a digital network out of own-resources – bootstrapping — as a way of avoiding the venture capital squeeze — bear-hugging. Now it’s time for some specifics.

Lately, we’ve been looking back over the past 16 months of Syntagma Media’s existence and attempting to work out the full cost of the operation in monetary terms. Remember, it’s been done without VC finance, bank or Angel loans or equity sales of any kind. The only aid has been a credit card, which is cleared at the end of every month. Clearly someone must have borne the full cost.

We calculated all the costs of setup, fees for advice, authoring, design, general tech, plus all the usual business stuff. I also added in my own cost and resources at my standard consultancy rate. The sweep mainly included Syntagma Digital, but also the much smaller liabilities of Dial Publishing — our incubating print arm.

The total cost to my personal exchequer came to $250,000.

I must confess I was a little taken aback by that number. I hadn’t realized I had that amount of loose change floating about. But accountancy doesn’t lie.

Of course, there has been a good deal of income, especially in the past 6 — 9 months. All of that has also gone back into the business. So the bottom line sits on the question : is Syntagma Digital worth more than a quarter of a million bucks?

I’ll let you into a secret, I was offered more than that around four months ago, but the deal involved running someone else’s British business.

Setting up a digital content business then doesn’t come cheap. The fact is, we could have spent considerably more as, for example, our near contemporary b5media has. It’s very much a matter of priorities and some fine calculation of whether a particular expenditure will be cost-effective or not. In my experience (16 months worth) most expenditures are not.

Refining the art of spending is therefore top of the agenda when it comes to bloodsucking your business — I use that term instead of bootstrapping here because it helps to know that it’s your blood the business is sucking. That knowledge alone concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Finale : Sixteen months in, $250,000 down, working like a sugar-cane cutter, no end in sight. Is it all worth it? Wait for the book*. All the killer facts are there.

* The Syntagma Story by John M Evans to be published by Dial Publishing later this year.

Strange thing, human nature. Ever since I announced I was writing a book called The Syntagma Story people are being very nice to me. I wonder why?

Maybe they think I’m going to write nasty things about them.

Well, it’s one way of getting people to buy a book. Needless to say, the first edition of this one will not have an index, so you won’t be able to look yourself up at the pre-checkout side of the bookshop. You’ll just have to buy it and read it from cover to cover.

As Syntagma is both Syntagma Media’s business website, as well as my personal jabberboard, I’m permitted to jab at whomever I like, so long as it shows a profit. Selling our own books counts twice.

Jo Vitale is said to be the master at moving business books off the shelf. But his method is all about skyscraper ads full of pratful patter and positive thinking. As far I as know he never used raw fear as a sales aid.

Ach! I knew it was a mistake to read our newest webtitle this morning : Guy Adams’s The Dark Room, devoted to the bloodcurdling arts of horror. If I go on reading this stuff, I may have to write a sequel to The Syntagma Story. Maybe I’ll call it, Marketing Books the Vampire Way.

Hang on to your clotting factor, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

The great benefit of being open about the building of Syntagma Media as a business and as a digital network is that the posts I write here can easily form the kernel of a book. Indeed they do : The Syntagma Story, to be published by Dial Publishing later this year.

The other less obvious advantage is that it may, in some small way, help others following along the same path. There are lots of pitfalls in this business and sometimes a word to the wise can avert an inevitable disaster.

None more so than in the area of finance. So here are a few notes — nothing more at this stage — on this potential minefield for all businesses.

I’ve long been an advocate of self-dependence in business, particularly at the startup and early stages. This is sometimes called “bootstrapping” in the sense of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”.

I’ve always preferred “self-resourcing” — using own-resources for the seed funding stage. Thereafter, in an ideal situation, income will fund growth and the business will be self-financing. All other sources of spending muscle introduced into the pot should be treated like fissile material — with great caution.

The power of own-resources can vary, of course, but every time you use the resources of others, whether debt or by share sale, you reduce your power to control the business. Indeed, once the venture capitalists move in you’ve set yourself up for eventual sale or an IPO (Initial Public Offering on the stock market).

Either way, you can no longer look forward to building a business that can be handed down the generations. Unless, of course, you do what Evan Williams did with Odeo and buy back the shares from investors. He had recently sold Blogger.com to Google so was not short of a bob or two. [Update Feb 20 :] Evan Williams has just put Odeo up for sale.

Another own-resource you’ll need to use early on is your brain. Many of the tasks in even a simple business are expensive to outsource. Building a digital network is painstakingly complex, so you’ll need to be up to serverside delvings, setting up websites, understanding Wordpress code, even designing your own inventory. Add to that, the ability to write the first few webtitles, and it comes down to an intimidating package of learning curves to master.

That takes time, and you just have to grin and bear it. Later, you’ll have the cash to induct new writers and splash out on fancy designers, but not at first, unless your credit card limit will bear it.

Those first few sites — Syntagma had 12, all written by me — will mature in the first year and provide the income to grow thereafter. If you bring writers in from the start, you’ll not generate that early supply of funding, especially as a new network needs to offer a good share of the pot in order to attract dependable authors.

If it’s just making money you’re after, you may think the VC route is no bad thing. But if, like me, you build a business for the sheer challenge and exhilaration of it (and as an aid to your writing career), you may not wish to sell chunks of it to often fixed-tracked minds with very different aims from your own.

I’m not saying that VCs are primitive people necessarily, some are extraordinarily civilized : Rick Segal, Fred Wilson and Jason Calacanis (now with Sequoia Capital) spring to mind.

Bootstrapping, though, is not for someone looking for very quick results. If you really are a digital farmer looking for a big buyout, go the venture route by all means. Be aware though, the pitching period is gruelling and long, maybe up to four months even for a relatively small sum. This is because the VCs are already anticipating further rounds of funding. First they put masking tape on your mouth, then they start cutting lengths of twine to restrain your hands, followed by thick ropes to thoroughly encase the rest of your body.

I’m told some people enjoy being trussed up like a turkey, but you may have other ideas.

Bootstrapping a business is for the buccaneers, those swashbucklers who could just as easily appear in a pirate movie. Or else they’re so cashstrapped, there’s no alternative to penny-pinching their way to the top.

So it all comes down to those old antagonists : Time and Money.

If you’re time-rich but cash-poor, bootstrapping is made for you — make sure you have a decent limit on your credit card, though. If you’re cash-rich but time-poor why on earth would you want to start a business in the first place?

Unless, of course, you’re a pirate with a pen — like me.

A Review of Mediated: How the Media Shape Your World by Thomas de Zengotita.

This is a scintillating, exhilarating ride of a book. If you’re interested in blogging, or any aspect of the media, new or mainstream, you shouldn’t miss it. The author is an academic in New York with a PhD in anthropology. He began his career as a Method actor.

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas — which was not included in the New Testament by the politicians of the Roman Empire for being too mystical — Jesus says, “Become a disciple of your own mind”. That was probably the last time anything so Buddhist appeared in official Christian literature.

Although Zengotita doesn’t use it, the saying applies very well to his book, providing the subtext beneath (as Shakespeare might have put it), “All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players”.

Zengotita begins in November 1963, when he was a student Method actor in New York. One day, a teacher entered the room and said, “President Kennedy’s been shot.” Then left.

The students took it for an exercise and started rolling their eyes, lifting their arms to heaven, keening and wailing and, presumably gnashing their teeth. As actors do. Thirty minutes later the teacher entered again. “The President just died.”

There was a stunned silence as the students realized it was really true. Then they started writhing on the floor and weeping and groaning all over again.

Zengotita draws the conclusion that this was new to our culture : extreme emotional reactions to the death of someone we didn’t know and had never met — except in the media.

He believes we have now reached the stage where we are totally immersed in media images which “mediate” all our reactions, feelings and belief systems. Instead of confronting reality directly, as Thomas’s Jesus urges us to do, we are just corks bobbing about on the choppy waters of mass media, which permeates us and drowns out our own perceptions.

This mediation has become all but total and has massive implications for the way we live. Marshall Mcluhan’s “The Medium is the Message” was only the half of it. How else would we tolerate the suffocating injunctions of “political correctness” were it not for the almost total power of the media to project it into the mass mind, and therefore our own.

Psychological contagions are every bit as destructive as pathogenic epidemics. In the 1930s, Fascism spread like wildfire around the world, leading to yet another world war. It was the counter-culture to another psychic contagion, Marxism, which all but became a religion : the Radiant Way. We had been warned.

Norman Mailer puts it well, “As Mcluhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of post-modernism in our existence today.”

The death of Princess Diana, with its worldwide Mexican wave of shock, was a typical example of this phenomenon in action. So was the very recent hubbub over the grisly end of the croc-baiter, Steve Irwin. These are not rational reactions. They show us as mediated characters, receiving our grief second-hand.

The world and life as a performance has become the norm. We are now used to seeing everything through the lenses of others. We’ve become part of a World Mind, instead of using our own. In the face of this, what can be done?

We can become a disciple of our own mind. Zengotita’s wonderful book makes a solid contribution to our belated understanding of this eerie phenomenon.

A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. Part of the Zen Masters Series.

The sixth and final part of the life of Zen Master Bankei is now up on our Spiritual Nirvana site. To catch up with the serial go here.

We are continuing this series with a master whose name looms large in Zen history. It is the aristocratic priest, Dogen (1200-1253), renowned for introducing the Soto Zen school into Japan. His philosophic writings on Being-Time are said to foreshadow the work of Einstein and quantum physics.

He was a master of words as well as Zen and one of the greatest writers in all Buddhism. Although little known now outside a small circle of Zen scholars, his legacy has lived on, especially in the West through Shunryu Suzuki, a recent Abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Start reading here