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Note: The Best and Worst are often intertwined, so we've renamed them upsides and downsides.

Upside: New digital options are opening numerous options for writers.
Downside: These same options also make it easier for writers to be exploited: Web content is being scooped up and resold with no attention to copyright or to sharing the profits with writers.
Upside: The NWU's Digital Bill of Rights and Copyright Crackdown campaign can help writers fight that trend.

Downside: Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt announced that it won't be acquiring any new trade book manuscripts, a move that an International Herald Tribune writer called "akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat."
Upside: The resurfacing of small independent publishers give fiction writers, poets, and non-fiction writers new opportunities to work with editors who value books as much as the bottom line.

Upside: Google settled the Authors Guild lawsuit for copyright violation when they scanned, without authors' permission, library book that were not yet in the public domain. Google will put $34.5 million into a new ASCAP-like Book Rights Registry.
Downside: As one NWU journalist put it: "It's nice to see Google not getting away with just stealing authors' work. However, 37 percent of revenue seems like an excessive amount for them to get."
Downside: Lawsuits, won, settled, or disputed, take time: the NWU/UAW-backed Tasini v. NY Times lawsuit is bogged down. Hundreds of writers such as Lynda Morgenroth, who wrote over 1,200 articles for the Globe over a career of two-plus decades, have not received a dime of the 18 million dollar settlement.

Downside: Major book publishers in the U.S. now number fewer than six, most owned by overseas corporations.
Upside: People still want to read, maybe more so than ever: the NEA reports that for the first time since 1982, the proportion of adults who have read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen, after decades of decline.

Upside: Locally, family-owned (for 76 years) Harvard Bookstore has been sold NOT to corporate entity but to a local couple, Jeff Mayersohn and Linda Seamonson, who will carry on its values, as Ifeanyi Menkiti, who bought the Grolier Poetry Bookstore did: it retains its independent, poetry-only focus.
Downside: Independent and unionized bookstore Powell's Books − "Amazon with a soul" − has resorted to urging its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals.
Upside: NWU members can order almost any book from powells.com, which has web pages featuring Boston Chapter authors' books.

Upside: Self-publishing technologies allow writers to produce and sell books whose quality now can (not always, but more often) compete with that of large and small publishers.

Downside: large publishers still dominate distribution channels.
Upside: Amazon reversed itself, after an outcry at its announcement that it wouldn't put only its own POD books on its website.

Downside: Shrinking opportunities for freelancers as the number and size of newspapers diminish (eg. Christian Science Monitor switches to weekdays online, weekend magazine).
Downside: the trend toward what Nicholas Lehman calls "journalism without journalists": in-depth investigative reporting and foreign correspondent reports are being replaced by "citizen journalists" and unpaid bloggers.
Upside: Building of independent political critiques.

Upside: Advocacy organizations like The Artists Foundation and Mass-Care − both of which our chapter is becoming active with − are getting writers' needs from tax codes to single-payer health care "on the agenda" at all levels of government. The current economic crisis may lead Congress to accept the need for universal single-payer health insurance, eliminating HMOs and private health insurance industry's high overhead and profits and in the process, saving billions annually.

Upside: In President Obama, we have a leader who is an impressive author of two best-selling books, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope, and an eloquent speaker. He has declared that his administration will be pro-union, pro-arts, pro health care, and anti-censorship. We hope that he'll resume the tradition started by the WPA by drawing on the talents of writers and other artists to rebuild not only roads and bridges but our historical/cultural perspectives.

Upside: Our National Writers Union members continue to help each other stand up for the principle of "writing for both love and money."