* the previous lot, outed on May 11, were moving in education towards the idea that teacher and school staff recruitment was best controlled by government on its own website. This is it, launched only 3 months before the UK election.

* one of the big bills for local government in the UK is teacher advertising. If this were to be done by government itself on the web, serious savings could be made, and these could be channelled back into the education system.

* futhermore, government doing the advertising enables better quality control to take place, offers ways of monitoring local government practises and ensuring compliance. And online application using government approved forms would create productivity gains and entrench better human resources practises. And government need not expand to contain the new service – it has been outsourced to Tribal Education, a supplier whose service fees would be less than the annual cost of advertising every vacancy in the commercial education press.

* and, what is more, the previous government can be blamed for the scheme! Surely a winner, then?

Hold on a minute. I did type “commercial education press”, didn’t I? Well, yes, there is one, led by the venerable Times Education Supplement (TES). Does it do teaching jobs online? Yes, it has an excellent service, developed since Mr Murdoch’s News International sold this unit away from Times Newspapers, fearing as he did that government may pull this trick. Now its owned by private equity investors who have courageously re-invested in it to modernize it, enable it to beat off web competition from eTeach and, to my great delight, have re-created it as a portal for communications amongst teachers. It has a great role yet to play in the exchange of resources in the UK teaching marketplace.

But will it be able to play that role if government policy cuts off its lifeline advertising revenues? Hard to say, but surely a Conservative government, devoted to the interests of private enterprize, will discontinue such a media abusive policy and ensure that this saving is not made. Even harder to say, in my view: government now has a bigger reason for not doing anything about putting  this into reverse – cost reduction beats out ideology in most instances.

Of course, that begs the question of whether costs really will be reduced this way. Last time round this track in the UK, it was National Health Service jobs. Britain’s NHS, with 1.6 million employees (third in the world behind the Red Army and the Indian Railways), was and is a huge recruitment advertising engine. Creating NHS Jobs permanently blighted the prospects of the nursing press and health management publishing in the UK, but there was a private sector winner, in the form of DMGT’s Jobsite, who leased the systems it used to the NHS in return for being able to mirror the NHS site, getting traffic though no revenues. The NHS system is now embedded in NHS personnel practise and there can be no going back.

So government has the capacity to blight whole sectors of publishing activity through re-inventing publisher services on the web? You betcha, and if you doubt, look at the UK’s regional press, once deeply dependent on local government advertising. The huge decline in local press interests, despite all the bleatings of politicians who professed their devotion to the local rag, was as much about the loss of government advertising as anything. And is this inevitable and should it be reversed? Given that government uses the network less effectively and in a more costly way than most users, there is a good case for advising them to stay clear. But that will not happen.

In a society where publishing is increasingly democratized, government will see its chance. And the ability to control and direct is irresistable. If the instrument of control is a job ad, then so be it. The advice to a Young Publisher may well be “Join the civil service” in due course, but for society at large this process may create a democratic deficit.

Come to think of it, did I describe that website as a policy ruin? I was wrong. It is a foundation for the next incumbent to build a more ideologically correct version. But how I wish that I was wrong about that too.

Lets start just there . Suppose for a moment that you agree with me that life cycles on the web are still speeding up . In other words , it took a decade for Google to build its brand , but five years for Facebook , and perhaps three years for their successors . This is a direct response to the rapid increase in the speed of ntework communication and not just the size of user populations . We now expect that friends and collagues will respond to a network relationship which demands attention.My daughter reported to her family this morning that she had been quoted in a Bloomberg article in the San Francisco Chronicle : within 30 minutes she had email responses from her husband , her father and her step-mother . We talk the language of these changes in pace but we do not really understand what their impact will be .

Yet in one sense we do . Notice how the network never throws anything away . Business model development is circular , as with much else in a world where there is no maturity , just renewal . So when I get a question about lead generation as an advertising business model on the web , I am bound to go back five years to a time when , in the US , lead gen was being seen as the saviour of the online advertising world . And why does online advertising need a saviour ? Because although it has grown persistently through the decline of print advertising , it is still a small , low margin sector of the economic activity of the web , once you have factored Google out of the equation . And , if you believe what I have written about speed of change , then you must factor in the decline of Google , and its replacement by a semantic-based atlternative  brewing even now in a garage near Bangalore .

Lead generation came about because its progenitors sought better than CPM returns , less dependence on search engines and more value-add to procure loyalty – stickiness . But just as the print yellow page players have never made an online impact commensurate with their offline power , so the lead gen players have never made an impact that measured up to the role that we designed for them five years ago . And part of the reason for this is another marked web behaviour model – the limitations the network seems to place on competitive replacement of aligned business models .

I need to unwrap that .I can do so by saying that in the mid-’90s I was one who proclaimed that a thousand business models would now flower on the web , and that users would pick the best , and then the better as it appeared , and so on in a frenzy of service choice activity . Well , I was wrong . What appears to have happened is that users chose , in every class of service , the best of its class , and then another , and while many more then appeared with enhancements , they stayed very loyal to those first choices , and many networked marketplaces became duopolistic as a result . And then , when a definite break with the old and still satisfactory services  took place , it occurred because of market disruption from a new ( and usually technological ) market activity . These duopolies , while they should have been a market stabilizing activity , now show signs of breaking down more speedily .Bear in mind too that technologies are getting cheaper , and technology spend has rarely , if ever , been a barrier to entry .

Which is a dispiriting picture if you are a duopolist in an online advertising market sector . Is this a determinist model : you must go down when the technology silver bullet hits you ? Not at all . Just review your entire business model annually , and let users drive your service enhancements and technology picks .If you are a sector leader , the real barrier is brand – something it takes newcomers more time to climb over than technology , though the breathing space it provides is very short . In online advertising , any sector duopolist must surely be looking at video for value enhancement , at developing web presence for advertisers ( the leading growth field in this year’s Outsell survey ), and above all at social media/buying clubs online . And this investigation of the direction of flow and the speed of change begins on Day 2 , after initial service change . Looking back , the most common characteristic of change-agents has been their propensity to believe that once changed , markets would stay that way long enough for everyone to make money . It ain’t necessarily so .

In more sober moments we inevitably discussed two urgent issues amongst the many strands pursued by speakers . The conference opened on Paywall Tuesday , the day when the Times and the Sunday Times launched their joint suicide pact . This topic reverberated around us on both days , with contrary viewpoints taken by speakers who felt , much as Peter Preston did in today’s Observer ((30 May 2010) that a facsimile newspaper would find a small and loyal audience , while others , including the afore-mentioned rock-god , felt that even if you argued  for the value and distinctive nature of the Times ” journal of record ” status and its very high quality columnists ,  the thing to do was to sell these values for themselves and sell them seperately , not look back over one’s shoulder at a format which , literally , now belongs in another world .

But that world was always with us . The other major topic was the future history of the iPad . Adam Hodgkin even passed his round the audience ( there was relief on his face when it eventually came back ) and both he and OUP’s Evan Schnittman dilated interestingly on business modela and distribution in a device -laden world . The sceptics said that the iPad had found the enthusiasts , but not yet a definition of use in a mass market . We may have to wait for 3.0 for the right functionality , but who cares , since we Europeans are still awaiting 1.0 .No one went to the wonderful extremes of Sue Halpern in May’s edition of The New York Review of Books . This is worth quoting ” In fact , Web browsing on the iPad is less than ideal …..But why bother going through a browser to get to YouTube or to read the AP headlines or check the weather when there is a dedicated app for each of these ? This is what is really revolutionary and game changing about the iPad: once there is an app for everything , its Apple’s Web , not the wide world’s ” Wow , this lady is obviously a rock-goddess !

Meanwhile , in the conference room we were more likely to decide that Google was the threat to the Web that needed attention . We covered video advertising , noted the return of display courtesy of Hugo Drayton (Inskin) , and looked at classifieds through the well-educated eyes of Fish 4 . In a hugely impressive session , Louise Rogers , the CEO of TSL Education , gave an object lesson in how to create community and fill it with user-derived content  – and fascinated many of us by her consistent refusal to go for instant monetization , preferring to build community strength in depth to continue to support her recruitment advertising model . This seemed admirable , though the proper approach will be tested by UK  government spending cuts in her sector – and the eventual wish of her private equity investors to make an exit . Her case study , and excellent demonstrations of clear strategic thinking at the Economist , at Bloomsbury publishing and at Complinet meant that no one could leave the room without the conviction that the digital revolution is now over . We even began a serious discussion of the semantic web without a single groan from a full audience representing some 120 industry players .

My apologies : I cannot mention each exceptional speaker by name . But any meeting that starts ( when he reached us ) with a keynote from Simon Waldman , looking back at his Guardian years and the ” creative destruction ” of the markets in which he worked  , and ended with Shane O’Neill giving a rallying cry of hope  based on the re-use of ex-government data  was not short on inspiration . I came away exultant : this industry is going to make it , and neither Google nor Apple can do anything to stop us !

But it was the walls of ancient Merv that brought me down . Having struggled arthritically to the top , and then onto the citadel , the view from what was once the greatest city in the world barring only Babylon exhibits – a desert . After Genghis Khan , the great city , which may have had a population close to one million , was never re-occupied . The deserts of Turkmenistan are unforgiving. Progress stopped here .

Almost the first thing that I saw on my return to work was the agenda for the next ePublishing Innovation Forum 2010 (www.epublishing-forum.com) which I am chairing in London on 25-26 May – next week – in London . Like the view from the top of the walls of Merv , it is inspiring , but for utterly different reasons . It reminds me of the pace and iterative nature of change in an information marketplace that is recreating itself from ground level in cycles that used to take a decade to complete , but which can now take 10 months .

Peering from the top of the walls , I know that I can no longer envisage an agenda that covers the whole spectrum of change . The great team who organize this event now know this too , so the keynotes are particularly important , from Simon Waldman of the Guardian at the beginning ( “The internet ate my business” !) to Shane O’Neill and his political perspective on using third party ( government) content at the end . In between come some case studies I really want to hear – Chris Pilling on the Complinet experience , or the Economist strategy on networks from Aeneas McDonnell . Evan Schnittman at OUP is a wonderful commentator on distribution issues , and Jonathan Glasspool at Bloomsbury is building a new digital world of professional and academic publishing with some interesting acquisitions .

Out there on the walls are also some seasoned observors , eyes narrowed to slits in the face of blinding sun and sandstorms . Adam Hodgkin , one of the industries most experienced venturers , will tell us how you build businesses which exploit iPhone and iPad , while Hugo Drayton , veteran of the Advertising Legion , puts fresh heart into markets which have at times looked like the Karakoram Desert itself .  

And I have only scratched the surface .Ian Eckert knows all about publishing platforms – from newspapers ( I first met him at Portsmouth and Sunderland , a group now as well forgotten as Merv itself ) to UBM , to TES and now back to making things work at Abacus . And TES’s current CEO , Louise Rogers , will be there to show how UGC really works .Other case studies include Fish4 ( who will no doubt remind me that I was once their chairman too ) and Conde Nast . And the panellists come from vital places like Nature , Penguin , Incisive Media and Pearson Education .All this gets somehow shoe-horned into two days ( pity the chairman ) and has so far gained a bigger audience than last year . I am pleased and proud that my colleagues at Outsell are once more , for a third year , its media partners .

Unlike ancient Merv , the network allows media to die in one context while regenerating in another . We have to use events like this to tap into the collective experience of that powerfull  speaking team to find out what natural laws govern that regeneration , whether experience can be replicated , how we can really understand user behaviour , what constitutes value add in the eyes of our users and whether we can understand and work with them successfully before they decide that we are part of the problem , not the solution . While I remain confident that publishing will never become a deserted city , it may be best to find out now what is in the minds of the Mongol horde on the network ,something which the citizens of old Merv never deigned to do .

I look forward to seeing you there .

In my last blog on this subject I merely mentioned Foursquare (http://foursquare.com/ and on the strength of that ( perhaps)  founder Dennis Crowley went off in search of series B funding at around $80m . This round had , says the SFGate  Business Insider service , ” every VC and their mother humping ( FourSquare’s) leg ” . Come to think of it , it wasn’t me who encouraged this : we rather frown on the uncontrollable urges of dogs and VCs in this village . Then came the news that the competition between FourSquare and Gowalla was resolving in favour of  the former , though both had a boost at SXSW (don’t ask ) and Foursquare told Bloomberg on Friday that they had moved from 170,000 users in December to 1 million now . Also since I wrote my piece the press has quoted Facebook and Microsoft as potential bidders , and some have even imagined Yahoo buying it for $100 million. Bloomberg quote an analyst called Kip Cassino ( cometh the hour , cometh the man with the name ) as estimating location -based services at an annual ad-spend of $4.1 billion in five years ((23 April) .

The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss has the right idea in her article online on 26 April : this is the three dimensional Nectar card ( think store discount cards in the US ). Local sites in the US have tracked around 2000 businesses signing up in California , and in the UK the first signatory was – the FT .(http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/12/foursquare-ft) We award Rob Grimshaw our prize for adroit brand association , and love the alliance with business schools alongside this .

And , no , I am not diverted by Blippy ( www.blippy.com ) , the what-I-bought-where site , and the news this week that a third of Craigslist’s income comes from advertising porn and prostitution only gets me excited in the sense that if they are getting $36m from this source , and they are the champions of free listings , then there is a great marketplace in the non-porn sector . Truth to tell , the concentration of service values on the geolocational mobile computer we will still insist on calling a phone is now and will in future become so great that , like Foursuare , new worlds will be created in the made-for-mobile sector which only come down to earth and internet when different types of processing and communications are  needed. For an interesting example , look at Plyce , the French version of all of this (www.plyce.com).

At a dinner this week I found myself talking to a revered former CEO from the regional press . I mentioned the great press baron(et) of Farnham , Sir Ray Tindle , whose average circulation of his many local titles , was , when I went to see him in the 1990s , around 12,000. Yet there was real profit in his enterprizes and a huge local lock-in for services which , then , people regarded as their own . That ownership is the trick that Facebook has pulled off in the internet , and which Foursquare can do in the geolocational sphere . The Guardian think they will be at 3 million by the end of the summer , but the important matter is that each of those users feel that they are living in a village of their own making , though it is one they can take with them wherever they go . Sir Ray , when I spoke to him , said that he had just bought the local newspaper in Llanwit Major – ” Its my size of town ! ” he said . I think that he would love Foursquare and see the opportunity to define the town , and eventually the newsflow and everything else , in the virtual mind-mapping of the individual , and even create custom print for him one day .

I shall be back here in a few weeks , having missed the UK  election campaign . However , I have cast my postal vote , and if my fellow citizens follow my lead then we shall have a completely new country by mid-May . On reflection , I think that geolocational services may be a better bet !

” I know the successor to Facebook ”

There , it is really quite easy . And it came to me naturally while contemplating the plainly inadequate oarsmanship of the Brothers Winklevoss and the demise of BeBo , suffocated in its sleep by the new regime at AOL . The twins , litigants in the Facebook case and winners of a $65 million dollar bonus for losing , are plainly seekers after Lost Causes . Thus they were rowing in the Oxford boat defeated by Cambridge in the recent Boat Race . I am not sure if they were connected to their lawyers and launching an appeal against the race judges while still rowing , but I am pretty sure that their mobiles were close by , and that their stay in the UK has been an intensively networked experience . And that is where , if they truly want to defeat Mr Zuckerberg , they should be investing their winnings . For the successor to Facebook is lurking out there in the mobile networks even now , built for the network , and not adapted to it as Facebook was .

Over at News Corp , the senior strategists are doing all-nighters to work out what AOL just got : neither MySpace or BeBo will make it . I could save them so much time . The answer is : Go and buy www.foursquare.com . Here is a made for the network social media environment that lets users rate the places that they visit , put them into the social media context , give them credit and points for discovering things ( I could be “mayor” of my local pub if I was’t too busy drinking there ) , and above all , like Facebook , give them credit in the eyes of their peers .

Amazingly then , tomorrow’s social media on the mobile/cell network appears to be a close relation of a number of web-based antecedents . Craigslist for a start . Mobile networking is all about spatial awareness and recommendation . Other parallel players might be the splendid www.brownbook.com , derived from the recommendation directory world , or Qype in Hamburg , Germany. If you are too late to buy FourSquare then there might be some ideas here . The latest BrownBook release now lists 34 million commercial entities globally where you can make comments and recommendations .

Once FourSquare is up and away bigtime ( sorry , the language goes with the subject) , you will want to create the real time links that show you when your friends are checked in to the bar or restaurant or hair salon or pub that you are just approaching on the street outside . Then the fun begins , but early investment before concept maturity is advisable . And only a few things remain to be said . One is that having discovered this I seem to have let the cat out of the bag before buying a major ( or any) stake . Which is why I am poor . Secondly , I seem to be saying that the future of social media and directories are inextricably linked , which is not where I thought I was going to end up . Lastly , if the history of the network is about constant innovation , then BeBo , MySpace and FaceBook can all be described as players who innovated once , and then stuck to the knitting . Which is why they will all be overtaken by the Next New Thing . And , guess what , you read it first here !

My answer is the Cisco CRS-3 , the newest router which really equips the internet as an integrator of digital video (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011300638_cisco10.html) . It could , say Cisco , move the entire Library of Congress in one second , or the entire archive of every film ever made in four minutes . But the thing that fascinates me at the moment is the way in which networks with embedded technologies like this will remove the volume/speed excuse that has traditionally lain beneath the reluctance of niched information providers to give whole solutions to user problems/demands . This is no where more obvious than in STM , which is where my second question arose .

“Well, ” he said , ” you clearly took a shine to Globalspec : what is the equivalent in STM  and why are they any better than we are “. I ignored the challenge implicit here , and replied that my pick in STM over a decade had been Nature Publishing , and this was about attitude . ” Full of geeks and nerds , eh ? ” Not at all , I replied ( mentally writing the title to this piece as I did so),

but it is certainly true that they are very quickly responsive to change , and experiment publicly in beta and in conjunction with their users until they find useful combinations that fit . Clearly therefore the new Nature iPhone App ( http://www.nature.com/mobileapps/) is not the end of the story , but it demonstrates Nature’s keen concern to get involved , early on and with an open mind , and strive to create utility for their users . This was the case with Connotea , their ground-breaking social tagging environment , with Scintilla , their news-tagging activity , with Nature Networks and with the network local hubs . It seems to me that the attitude here is service -orientated and not product -centric , and that the logic says that users who are involved in service developments and have a stake in them are less likely to go elsewhere , especially if they started with Nature as grad students .

This does not mean that more traditional business development activities can be ignored . Nature has to be top of the heap in quality terms . Over a decade its content coverage has improved mightily and , through its associated publishing , it is now well on the way to core coverage across the “hard ” sciences . In one sense nothing is more traditional than recruitment advertising : once an area of neglect this is now a keystone of the arch and a factor which helps cement the Nature community together . I predicted to my interlocutor that I thought education would be a continuing interest , and that I was vitally concerned to see how Nature was able in time to make rafts of multiple media experimental evidential data available to users . Their Gateway strategy , from Cell Signalling and Neuroscience , had led the way in this field : when , I wondered , would it become the norm for research published by Nature to be linked to the evidential databases behind the work .

He leapt upon “education “. ” You mean Second Nature on Second Life – if we had all gone there we would be bankrupt “. Well , I have no idea what Nature has spent with Second Life , but I do know that when people like me stop writing about things , then other people tend to think that they have ceased to exist . Plainly wrong . Traded revenues on Second Life in 2009 totalled , in real world dollars , 567 million , a 65% increase on the previous year . And in December , with  770,000 unique users during the month , residents/users  checked out $ 55 million in earnings converted into cash . Not centre stage , but certainly not dead ( see also  .http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/22_09_09 )

And no doubt Nature will be pursuing other educational initiatives : pulling Scientific American under the same management is undoubtedly a step forward in this regard. While continually consolidating and refining their offerings through the lessons taught by their users , I have also no doubt that  their tradition of experimentation will continue to thrive in a company increasing divergent from its peers in this respect . Elsewhere  the impact of technology , while far-reaching , has often been isolated from the thinking about editorially constructing a research journal . But then , Nature was always more than just a research journal .

Last word with Google . In the week of the Cisco announcement , they  indicated an experiment with Dish to create Google TV-Search (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10465956-93.html ) , a way of intercombining a Google search and a set-top box , while TiVo announced new digital video recorders which bring back video from the Web . This is the next New Frontier : we need to calculate the impact on the expectations of users in B2B, STM or other areas of business and professional information now , while we are at the on-ramp , not when we are facing new competitors . This is what Nature have done so well .

PS In my note Viva , Las Vegas , and here  , I have tried to emphasize the continuing importance of virtual reality , so it was good to see  UBM relaunch the Comdex compueter show as VR only(.http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10463726-93.html )

Ok , guilty as charged.  I have become too used to having to shock traditional media owners into action through prophecies of instant decline.  And I do claim to be an individual of sunny and optimistic disposition.  So I am going to write about a 1996 start-up which now has a commanding market position in its sector. It announced its global registered users for the end of 2009 in a statement this week, and though it is a success story well worth telling, for traditional media players in engineering, manufacturing and the science and technology segments attached to them, it is a filter placed between themselves and their users which few can now avoid or supplant.

The company is GlobalSpec.  Here a now hugely experienced team under Jeff Killeen have slowly but surely created a category leader through the simple device of treating engineers as a community, and encouraging them to do so around the data content of the sector.  Put all the product catalogues and listings with the product specifications in one place (25,000 catalogues, with 2.2 million products and 184 million searchable product specs).  Make them parametrically searchable, and you have a result that slots into engineering workflow as a must have component. Then add a vertical search engine alongside this, where all sources of engineering information available on the web can be categorized and found, where the design specifications of working engineers can be sourced, and where third party content as well as freely available public content can be obtained ( if you own an engineering journal, you face the agony of being here – or of not being seen).  Then add over 60 emailed engineering sector newsletters, all pushing industry news and announcements to self-qualified audiences.  And from this year, add eEvents, meetings, conference and exhibitions) .

So they have got a tiny segment well sewn up?  You could say that.  This week’s announcement about this “tiny segment” indicates that their registered user count rose during 2009, recession notwithstanding, by some 900,000 engineers. They now have 5.6 million registered users. In that same year of slowdown and industrial decline globally, registered readership of  the e-newsletters went up 21% , to an astounding total of 9.1 million.  And still new users are coming on board: the company indicates an accretion rate of 80,000 new users a month.

So something fairly significent is happening in places like this.  This is not about whether people will read their engineering newspaper on their laptop or their iPad, or whether there is still a place for long-form narrative in engineering texts, reference books or white papers.  It is about solutions to information handling that increase productivity, improve decision making and ensure better and less costly compliance with the regulation that bedevils the sector.  It is about the nature of the network: a community identifying itself, and communicating with and between itself.  GlobalSpec is the result of the painstaking work of people who now understand exactly how engineers work on their desktops within their enterprise systems.

So the engineers have congregated at Globalspec: how do you make money out of them?  With their willing co-operation you create sales and marketing services that suppliers in this marketplace will pay for.  Real-time sales leads from the database which give those suppliers who put their content in lead generation which is filtered, measured and immediately contactable.  Do not contaminate this with the word Advertising, but it is paid for from the same budget.  The newsletters, now moving down into highly fragmented sub-sectors of product and service types in the industry (and providing more inventory as they subdivide), also give more traditional promotional opportunities, as do the e-events.  Ask yourself: as a seller, do you go to the traditional engineering newsheet classifieds page to place your product in the community eye – or do you come here?

And this is truly Global.  If you want to speak to engineers in Shanghai instead of Scunthorpe or Spokane, then come here. The questions about it are many: How many GlobalSpecs can a sector sustain?  What happens to traditional media players who now supply their customers through this interface?  Do “old media” buy these success stories and could they run them if they did?  The fact is however that a new world order has arrived, and we all need to recognise it.  A colleague said recently “You never write about vertical search anymore – did it fail?”  No.  I don’t need to write about it anymore , because it has succeeded.

Footnote : Warburg Pincus, and Mark Colodny, the Managing Director who has been responsible for Globalspec, deserve recognition for patient and consistent support through the growth period.  As a result they now have a property of high value.  The exit is the real test!

Sometimes these books are scarcely worth reading.  Especially in America, where more banalities on business are pressed within hard covers more quickly than in any other place on Earth.  If you think this when you see “Newsonomics” by Ken Doctor in your bookstore, pick it up and read it.  This is something quite different: descriptive prose and fresh insight about the news business by someone who knows how to interview, can argue a case in lucid English, and writes with the sympathy of an insider and the distance of a practised analyst.  This is no accident.  Ken did more than 20 years, man and boy, before the mast in newspapers, and latterly in the now defunct Knight Ridder, where he had the helm in digital enterprises  in San Jose.  Here at least they took the approaching digital tsunami seriously, even if elsewhere they were unable to ride out the storm.  Ken then became a celebrated news media analyst, both on his own Content Bridges blog and for Outsell.

So this should be good.  And it does not disappoint.  Here you will find a good analysis of what happens in a media segment when the classical gatekeeper editorial role becomes diminished in Authority.  You can see here an industry contracting and consolidating as cyclical change becomes structural.  The growing disaffection of readers is matched by the inability of news providers to come up with any recognition of what their readers now want, and the people who read that disaffection most accurately are the advertisers, who quietly head off elsewhere.  Meanwhile new aggregators re-intermediate with new solutions, turning the old suppliers into secondary sources – and sometimes free sources at that. Meanwhile, readers are becoming newsmen, local is being reborn, and community in the network begins to recreate news forms which in print had taken two hundred years to evolve.  Reporters get to be bloggers, niche is more important than general and everyone is Editor.  A new form of marketing is born around viral distribution, which begins to suggest new roles for news media.  This is a great story, and it has not been told in a better analytic style than here.

By the time I came to the end I almost shed a tear for old Rupert M, struggling on past pension age to feed the family and make sense of all of this.  Ken’s analysis makes it clear to me that you cannot buy your way in (My Space-style). You have to build it and know it, experiment through failure to success.  And you cannot postpone it with a paywall, or hope that television will be immune.  In some ways the visual world of the web will sap the defences of television news more rapidly, aided by the filtering of Twitter and the super-distribution of YouTube.

By a glorious irony, Ken’s publisher is St Martins Press (Macmillan) the global super-publisher who forced little old Mom-and-Pop digital corner bookstore Amazon into a price deal that they did not want in the public interest despite the fact that it increased their margins.  This should mean that the eBook version should be out now too, but even if it isn’t, order this on Amazon or www.stmartins.com ( ISBN978-0-312-59893-8).  Worth every penny of whatever John Sargent tells Jeff Bezos it is worth.

History does this.  Eighteenth century libertarians in England looked back at a world of idealized Anglo-Saxon common lands and village councils, and deplored enclosures and loss of liberty.  Now we look back at the enclosed parkland estates as the real world that we have lost.  In the same way, newspaper owners who have long lost touch with the ill-written bastardized press releases used in Britain’s regional press to divide columns of advertising, and who have spent a decade firing the ignoble hacks who produced this nutrition-free copy in order to maximize margins, now appear on high horse to defend their high-value ”content” from web users when those Anglo-Saxon peasants have the cheek (or innocence) to want to link similar references together in the collaborative world of the web.  Only this week did the Intellectual Property Director of NewsInternational liken linking to shoplifting (Guardian letters, 25 January 2009) and protest that ” The public is well-served by companies like News that invest in creativity”.

And then, still worse, the CEO of Trinity Mirror uses last week’s Oxford Media Convention to lambast local government-run news sheets as “mini-Pravdas” which provide a further source of unfair competition for her declining news output.  Here indeed is an industry first: whoever heard of British local government, when mentioned in the pages of the regional press, ever getting anything right  ?  But here, like the BBC, they now appear to be a rival.  Perhaps this is because they generally cannot afford to rewrite the press releases, and are therefore compelled to pass them on accurately?  Or have they taken to employing the wordsmiths fired by the private sector?  The real issue here, as with the newspapers of Mr Murdoch, may be about political influence, but that somehow does not seem to be a cause for concern.

When we get to write the history of these headless days in the decline and fall of the Press, we will wonder at the lack of strategic appreciation.  It is not just that the co-operative web community environment is wholly alien to people who sell a bundle of folded paper sheets to each of many isolated, individual citizens.  It is the lack of thinking around scale and impact which is so surprising.  This week produced a classic example.  The UK start-up Rightmove, founded by real property resellers and now a quoted company, dominates the UK market.  In 2007, Mr Murdoch came in with a rush and bought smaller and more specialized services like Globrix and Propertyfinder.  Last year News International sold off these interests, and this year DMGT bought Globrix, and put it into its Digital Property Group with Findahome, Findaproperty and PrimeLocation.  This gives DMGT a large but second ranked portfolio of services in a market where its ability to command the attention of real estate agents is much diminished.  The other News Corp property, PropertyFinder, has gone to Zoopla, the alternative community trade model which cuts out, or at least cuts down, the agent middleman.  Strategically, neither DMGT or News feels like an expensive competitive auction for Rightmove: equally, neither could face up to a business model that meant cutting the throats of their erstwhile advertisers, the real estate agents.  Result: strategic paralysis.  Reasons for hope: DMGT is no longer dependent on selling newsprint for over 50% of its revenues and profits.  And neither is Hearst.  What would William Randolph and Lord Alfred have made of that?