After holding on to his website for many years, the creator of The Wire opened his site to share his online thoughts. In his introduction, Simon included a stern warning for all creators who write for free on the Internet. Check it out:

Anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere.   If at any point in the future, this site offers more than a compendium of old prose work and the odd comment or two on recent events — if it grows in purpose or improves in execution — I might try to toss up a small monthly charge in support of one of the 501c3 charities that I soon hope to list in the How To Help section.  And yes, I know that doing so will lose a good many readers; but to me, anyway, the principle matters.  A free internet is wonderful for democratized, unresearched commentary, and it works well as a library of sorts for content that no longer needs a defense of its copyright.  But journalism, literature, film, music —  these endeavors need people operating at the highest professional level and they need to make a living doing what they do.  Copyright matters.  Content costs.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

At the BookNet Canada Technology Forum conference in March, Workman Publishing group publisher Bob Miller delivered a lecture entitled, “Can This Business Be Saved? Experimenting With New Models for Trade Publishing.” In the video embedded above, you can watch the former publisher of HarperStudio ponder the lessons he learned at the recently shuttered imprint.

Miller opened the speech with a list of the Top Ten Ways You Can Calculate a Book Is Too Risky to Publish. On top of the list was a joke at the expense of books born on the Internet: “We don’t know what the book is yet, but the author has 12,000 friends on Facebook.” Blogger and HarperStudio author Choire Sicha disagreed in passionate essay on The Awl.

Here’s an excerpt: “Miller also claims that ‘small advances’ (that’s $100K and lower, and if you’re a fiction writer, you’re currently thinking “I’d kill someone for a $40K advance!) made the house unattractive to “track record” authors. This misses the point; a house like that is supposed to make writers, and can afford to gamble on books, not just buy the cache of authors outright as is done in the wrecked publishing star system. Bob totally misunderstands what he was doing, and how and why he was doing it, it sounds like?”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

HarperStudio publisher Bob Miller is leaving to serve as Group Publisher at Workman Publishing and HarperCollins’ and U.S. publisher Michael Morrison will lead HarperStudio when Miller departs in May. HarperStudio created a Formspring.me page to field questions from readers. One person asked the looming question: “Will you be canceling contracts or will all books that have been signed up be published?”

This answer was posted: “No contracts canceled. Books that are on the schedule through Fall 2010 will be HarperStudio titles — and after that we’re going to put our heads together and figure out what where when how for the rest. Maybe HarperStudio 2.0. Maybe something different. I have no idea, but I feel like the world is our oyster. I LOVE our authors (all of them) and can’t wait to work on their books — and the mojo goes where we go. To be continued, for sure.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here’s an excerpt: “Lots of people are playing a little game this week–you can play along at home, it’s easy! The game is called: On Which Page Of Mary Gaitskill’s Nutty Memoir About Her Lost Cat And Everything Else Will You Start Weeping? It’s not a fun game but here we are in the hot lonely wasteland of the end of August, so what else do we have?”

Published in Granta 107, the intensely personal essay focuses on Gaitskill’s obsessive quest to find her missing cat–an unexpectedly gripping story. As Sicha’s sideways compliment attests, the essay has managed to rattle readers, turning the warm and fuzzy pet memoir genre upside down in the process.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.