Editorial
Paper and the Myth of Permanence

I am now and have forever been a news junkie. A morning without The New York Times leaves me feeling that I am cut off from the pulse of the world. This hunt for information used to mean that my fingers would become smudged from the newsprint rubbing off the stack of newspapers and magazines that I perused each day. But though I've continued my search for the perfect news fix, I've left the ink stains behind, for I no longer plunk down change and snatch up my papers. The Times--like many other of my favorite reads--has migrated to the Internet. The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly--have all instituted pixel editions in addition to their original paper products.

Internet legitimacy is not only for those Web magazines that have grown out of previous incarnations first manufactured from dead trees. Numerous must-reads have grown to be embraced by the cognoscenti without ever having known a printing press. Such periodicals to be bookmarked include Salon, Slate, Inside and countless others. Acceptance of these venues has involved a massive change of thinking on the part of readers. No longer does content have to be printed on pulp paper to have value. At last, the value is finally recognized to reside where it always was all along--in the words, rather than in the the physical object meant to hold them. Convincing the world of this hasn't been as easy as you might think.

This new media dynamic is unsettling to those for whom the manner in which ideas are delivered is more important than the ideas themselves. But the stubborn have been with us always. I imagine that in ages past, those who stored information on clay tablets felt anxious when communication began to occur on papyrus scrolls, and when someone then decided that it would be better to abandon those scrolls for sheaves of paper bound into books, well, that must have seemed heretical to some. "How can an idea possibly still have value now that its form has changed?" I can almost hear them say. But that would be like mistaking the bottle for the wine. The body and spirit of communication have been inextricably separated here on the Web, where you are reading my words now in a way that gives the lie to the myth of the permanence of paper.

Freedom of what press?

Many years ago I heard it said that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Today, freedom of the press at last belongs to anyone with a PC and a Web site. The multiton printing presses churning out news in factories the size of football fields have been replaced with millions of presses--called computers--that sit on desktops around the world. Perhaps that wildfire of press freedom is one reason that this transitional time causes anxiety in some consumers of news and fiction--democracy in such a heavy dose can be a disorienting thing.

Because of this ease of communication, some critics have said that being published on the Web is like not being published at all. If everyone can do it, who gets to decide when it has value? One editor of a respected genre magazine which does not normally reprint fiction that first appeared elsewhere has even stated that he would publish a story that had a previous life on the Web--because to him that previous publication carried no weight. Luckily, other SF mavens--such as Gardner Dozois and David Hartwell, who have considered Internet-only fiction when assembling their best-of-the-year anthologies--are not so stubborn.

The uphill battle continues, even though the influence of Internet-only magazines is undeniable. The audience I have here at Science Fiction Weekly--over 186,000 registered readers and growing--is many times that of my old Science Fiction Age audience. Ellen Datlow, the former editor of Omni, is now editing SCI FICTION, a forum for short stories with a potential audience far greater than those who picked up her former print publications on the newsstand. Even though she was the editor of the only two online stories ever to win World Fantasy Awards for work she acquired while at Omni Online and Event Horizon, she, too, is up against that question--in a medium where content is given away for free, how do you distinguish that which has value?

This is the time of year when you get to answer that question. It is now Hugo Awards season, a time when fans cast their initial ballots to see who will make the final ballot for the awards given out at the World Science Fiction Convention later this year. Internet editors are eligible in the Best Editor category, and internet short fiction is eligible in the Best Short Story, Novelette and Novella categories, something which in this transitional time is often forgotten. With new media suddenly competing against old, remember what really matters is not paper and ink, but words and ideas, something which the Internet is uniquely designed to deliver. We hope you'll always remember that.

Consider our promise never to leave ink on your fingers just a bonus.