Shawn, who publishes The Carton, has some great points on the growing shift towards the indie writer. Not just in regards to writers going indie, but also in regards to us, the reader, tracking with individual writers over the larger news conglomerates:
Finding a good writer has become more about the authors writing and less about which company they are working for. For example, I follow Andy Ihnatko because I heard him on MacBreak Weekly and I continue to subscribe to his articles because of his writing and intense command of comedy. I don’t follow him because he writes for the Sun Times.
We are just now on the cusp of this change. Or, as Mandy Brown wrote so eloquently last week:
It’s impossible to recognize a tipping point until it’s behind you, but I suspect that we may be able to look back and see something shift right around now—see the point at which the way we read broke ranks with the way the news is made. We are no longer monogamous readers, loyal to a single source; rather, we read voraciously, looking for patterns, teasing out the things that matter to us, making connections, and then (often) writing about them ourselves. We are consumers of news, not The News.