Geoff Ryman Quotes

I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book.

On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.

I started my blog in 2002. That was pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook. That was back before newspapers realized they were going out of business. That was back when no one gave any credence to Internet writers.

I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print.

When people tell you Web content is better than television content, they probably don't mean that, they probably enjoy the format of the Web better than the format of TV.

It has been aptly noted that web browsers are less Internet navigation tools than they are ebooks with highly diverse content.

I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn't increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

The first thing you learn when you're blogging is that people are one click away from leaving you. So you've got to get to the point, you can't waste people's time, you've got to give them some value for their limited attention span.

I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging.

Articles themselves are condensed to narrow columns of text across 5, 6, 7 pages, and ads that are really distracting for the reader, so it's not a pleasant experience to 'curl up' with a good website.

Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.

I sure do think it is an emergent form, but I also despair of reading online until screen quality is better.

I read blogs quite a bit.

I read more bloggers now than mainstream columnists, because they've got more interesting things to say.

Writing that's native to the web is different in ways that are crucial but subtle enough that you can miss them if you conceive of your audience as reading a printed product.

The funny thing is that I used to be a blogger, but it wasn't known as 'blogging' at that time. This was in the '99/2000 time frame.

The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.

Some millennials have completely stopped watching TV. So for them, we've created special digital content for handheld devices only. We've paid close attention to how to present online content effectively. We try to catch their attention within the first five seconds - otherwise, they click onto a different content.

It would be ridiculous to ignore the speed and possibilities of the digital landscape - you absolutely need to have fast-moving news online, but if you want to build a large audience over time, you absolutely have to take a risk on the big challenging stuff.

It is true that a lot of people are easily distracted online. As a result, too many of us have given up on digital audiences for ambitious work, and this is a mistake.

Print is definitely more nutritious. When I leave a website, I'm hungry again an hour later - especially the Chinese websites.

I feel empowered when I create high-quality content on the Internet.

When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page.

If you can present your case clearly and visually, anyone can understand it. No one has an attention span.

The Internet is a sketch show.