Adam Bellow is an executive editor at large for Doubleday. A lifelong New Yorker, his latest book is “In Praise of Nepotism: A History of Family Enterprise from King David to George W. Bush.”

Adam Bellow – He envisioned a new way to connect people

I was interested in the possibility of a digital community before there was one. Back in 1984 or ‘85, I joined the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. I was interested in exploring ways to use digital networks to connect communities of writers and thinkers. I had some family connections to the old Greenwich Village “Partisan Review” crowd, and I recognized that it was no longer going to be possible to have that very close geographically-centered intellectual/artistic community, but it seemed there must be a way to recreate that using a digital network.
But the people who were coming out of that program thought a really good job was designing touch screen interfaces for Citibank. So I told the director of that program that I was going to look for a job in publishing instead. She responded, ‘I guess you’re really a print person.’ I had to agree —that’s what I was meant to become. So I went into the publishing business, in a company called the Free Press, which was then part of McMillan. I was eventually the editorial director of the Free Press from 1994 to 1998.

I found that after the Reagan election, the country began to visibly move to the right, but I really could not share the existential panic of liberals. It began to strike me as an odd and perplexing phenomenon. My feeling was that conservatives are Americans too, they have a right to have their opinions heard.

A challenge ahead for big publishing

These days, the big publishers are very scared. People in the old news media already know that the Internet and blogosphere are capable of profoundly changing the way that they do business. The challenge is inevitably going to be extended to big publishing — it just hasn’t happened yet. I’m not sure that my father would subscribe to some of the utopian fantasies and enthusiasms that have been generated by the rise of digital technology. But I think that he was aware that the old forms of literary exchange were dying — or if not, they were losing their centrality in the life of modern culture, and that something else would have to come along.

Book publishers have taken something that was originally, in the 18th century, a very fluid medium where ideas were circulated in the form of large numbers of pamphlets and broadsides – taken that fluid discourse and commoditized it. Many people feel that somewhere inside many of these $30 400-page hardcover books is a much smaller, leaner, pithier book screaming to get out. But the publishers don’t want to let it out, because then they can’t charge $30 for it!

So I’m approaching the Blogosphere with an interest in the impact — as one might put it — of the iPod revolution on the publication of ideas. I want to be part of the future of intellectual publishing, not the past.

On our direction

What is Pajamas Media? When I talk to people in my business, I try to explain to them like this: there was a kind of Big Bang in the last three or four years, in which hundreds of thousands of blogs were established, like little stars all over the sky. And just like in the beginning of the universe, these little points of light have begun to coalesce into galaxies and solar systems, each with their own center of gravity.

And Pajamas Media is one of these. There are others, but I think that Pajamas Media has the promise of being the largest and developing the strongest center of gravity. So that’s my story. I’m involved in this as an advisor — somebody from the traditional media side.