Grits at the Ritz

Audio geeks of yore used to build their custom stereo systems from expensive German-made components, and the finishing touch was a placard that said something along the lines of:

ACHTUNG!
Das Machinenwerken ist nicht fur Gefingerpoken
und Mittengrabben by das Dumkopfen.
Ist easy Snappenspringen und Blowenfusen
mit Poppencorken und Spitzensparken.
Das Rubbernecken Touristen keepen
das Hands in das Pockets und watch
der Blinkenlights.

People thought this was incontinence-provokingly funny. Not the Hogan's Heroes German, but the fact that it was printed! And not just printed, but printed in a Fraktur-like typeface that looked like a real WWII German poster.
I call it grits-at-the-Ritz humor: An expensive, elaborate delivery system makes you think you're going to get something important and valuable, and then--wham! You get a plate of grits. Or a stupid fake-German sign.
In the vinyl-record era, when people saw anything set in type, they assumed it was important, because typography and printing required machines that cost a small fortune and took years to learn how to use. The folks who made novelty-shop tchotchkes knew they could get a laugh by contrasting the important-looking printing process with the dumb gefingerpoken gag.
You don't see the gefingerpoken sign on audio systems anymore, and not just because it's too big to hang on an iPod. Anyone can set type and print a sign now, using machines that cost a few hundred dollars and require virtually no training. In the 21st Century, setting a joke in type doesn't make it funny.
But grits at the Ritz is the idea behind a whole new class of entertainment, from The Real World to EBaumsWorld. We're so accustomed to the broadcast media bringing us "professional" entertainment, we can't help but laugh when we see somebody being a total dork on television!
But YouTube and its ilk are changing all that. Amateur-grade video is becoming the default, and when that happens, the media will lose their ability to bestow importance on the message (or make it funnier). We won't be able to leverage the Ritz-iness of media to make audiences pay attention to our grits, so we'll have to make better messages.
The most powerful example of a medium conferring importance on its content is books. It's at the core of how I define publishing mojo: "For centuries books have been the vehicle for the best that human culture has to offer. . . . publishing mojo [is] the conviction that what we are making is valuable, and deserves all the care and creativity we can muster." Every 21st-Century publisher's mission statement should include learning to create value in a world where value is no longer derived from the laborious book manufacturing process.

The three faces of publishing

When civilians talk about publishing, they almost always mean the world of book signings and movie rights. I'm a stranger in that world, although I've spent much of my career in publishing. As I told Jim McCormack's graduate class at Emerson College last year, publishing isn't one business, it's at least 3 very different businesses:

• The entertainment business, where you find Harry Potter and Henry Miller. Highly vulnerable to recession and to competition from other entertainment options (Internet, television, movies, etc.)
• The information business, where you find textbooks, academic journals, reference books, and the like. Spending is less discretionary (you can read a Harry Potter book, watch a Harry Potter movie, or do neither. But you can't pass Calculus without your Calculus text, whether you get it in print or on your laptop.)
• The inspiration business, where you find religion and the softer varieties of self-help. (If you think inspiration is too trivial to deserve its own category, consider that in 2006, religious publishing revenues grew 5.6%, versus 3.2% growth for US book publishing as a whole.)

If you look at publishing this way, some segments are more viable than others, but all of them are defined by ideas and audiences, not delivery systems. This is probably what Time and Warner (and Harcourt and General Cinema) had in mind when they merged, but they couldn't make it work, because their principal revenue streams were tied to delivery systems, not content.