Jun
29
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Who guards the Guardians? The Latin tag I learnt at school applies in a very general sense to the ability of a free press to survive in a digital age, but I want to address it very specifically to the Chief Executive of the Guardian Media Group as he enters his second year of guarding the Guardian at a time when many reasonable, progressive and liberal minded people in the world wonder whether such an institution can long survive. As one who started reading it as a student in 1960 and who treasures it as much today, I wonder too, so I decided to write to Andrew Miller with some thoughts on possible strategies:
Dear Andrew, Congratulations on surviving Year 1, and please do not be affronted by this letter of advice. You and I have never met, and I have no conflicts of interest with GMG, but I do have a great sense of engagement, and want the good that the Guardian accomplishes in the world to go on in some form or other in our digitally networked world. When I was a boy The Guardian was a voice in Manchester, then the UK and now globally. Sustaining it using the conventional business models of failed newspaper publishing is not going to work so we are going to have to think more laterally. Since you are a not-for-profit Trust-owned institution the issue is not one of returns to investors, it is simply one of survival . But sustainable survival is vital, and that, I shall argue, means creating a new mix of old business models.
Lets look first at the exemplars of survival in our own times. Two stick out immediately. DMGT have created a B2B empire around data which, alongside their interests in Euromoney and events, surpasses the newspaper side of the group in both revenues and margins. This is the story of 15 years of activity, with the man who painstakingly collected and backed the data acquisitions in areas like environmental checking and property now running the whole group. This “solution” repairs group results to a great extent, but it does not extinguish the slow leak of market and margin at Northcliffe (unlike GMG, they stayed regional when they should have sold) or Associated. Even the discovery of global success for the Mail as a celeb voyeur vehicle digitally does not do that. You have wonderful global usership too, and you can’t seem to monetize it either.
The other critical exemplar is Hearst. Here they are playing two games at once. Diversification is represented by Hearst Business, now a world leader in healthcare and medical diagnostic information (including the UK’s NHS). Moving within the value chain is represented by the iCrossing acquisition, which allows them greater control of ad markets, and, now that they have bought Hachette Fillepatchi’s US interests, gives them greater inventory in which to deal. So here is a huge endorsement of the “old” magazine model – provided that you are bigger in a diminishing market and can exercise greater control/derive margins from the syndication of advertising. But I am really sorry, Andrew: neither of these models offers a solution to you.
What, short of re-inventing the newspaper, does? Lets look at some strengths and weaknesses. It is surely useful, though it must appear troublesome at times, that you have an asset like EMAP and an asset like Trader Media. On the latter we will have to bow to your expertise, since you were instrumental in creating it in its current form. The last financing deal with your partners, Apax, seems like a good way in a bad year to liberate some cash, but this asset remains your landbank, the place where you turn in a rainy day for a cash injection. But like all these things, when your need is great TMG’s value will be low, and every move has to be agreed with your co-investor. When both of you are agreed, ie now, then exit beckons. I would take it.
Which leaves EMAP, a troubled asset if ever there was one. The ability to sell this successfully now is, in my view, nearly nil. You will be forced to put in new management and restructure, close more and more print and try to rationaize a portfolio vehicle in markets where the focus has gone digital and vertical. In EMAP’s main verticals it does not have a complete workflow solution (areas like construction and automotive), while elsewhere only in fashion does it have standalone digital environments. This is a break up, the lateral thinking starts here, and somehow you have to persuade your friends at Apax, whatever the complications of their fund structures, that this is the case.
In the digital world the foot print of the Guardian looks viewed from my seat, like this: strong UK community environments amongst educationalists and teachers, social services and policy, government workers and the media industry. All of those, with the exception of UK civil servants, have natural extensions into global markets. GMG has started down the track of investing these communities with content (though all have been hit hard by recession). Given its strong branding in these areas, surely it makes sense to push forward with networked services for these communities , and services that have a real impact on their workflow and working lives. Have you noticed how TES Connect (the former Murdoch Times Educational Supplement, affected like you by the collapse of teacher recruitment advertising in the UK) has developed a very successful service helping teachers to exchange lesson plans and learning resources? Where are your equivalents of these in education (you may have to use that TMG cash to buy TES!), or in social services or in media? Unless you are digitally plugged into the network lives of your principal groups of users, and unless you offer yourselves as the branded, trusted means of them communicating with each other, I fear that you will lose your grip on them. Unfortunately I cannot tell you what the next “newspaper “will look like, but I can tell you that it will be invented by users themselves in these networked communities.
So how can you speed up that verticalization of the Guardian? Raid the EMAP cookie store. EMAP owns BETT, the leading educational technology fair in Europe, it owns Local Government Chronicle which is the only other thing that many of your local government readers use, it owns a raft of media properties including BRAD (and you could even sell CAP to TMG and add value through investing the used car value chain). Some of this will not fit and will have to go, but other properties will increase the speed with which you can deepen and concentrate Guardian Professional and really make an impact on the working lives of your major readership/classifieds groups. In other words, the strategy is “use the brand and authority, and the accident of acquisition, to move from B2C to B2B to a service environment that has news, opinions and networks at its heart as it goes global”.
Andrew, if you are still awake, two more things trouble me. Please do not go the paywall route: for my money the FT have the game to emulate, and as you turn into a service environment that model will be easier to adopt, while your news and commentary can remain free. Secondly, while David Astor’s Observer was the vehicle of my political awakening (Suez, 1956) you have inherited a very pale imitation. It will all have to go into the Weekend Guardian (but do make sure that Peter Preston keeps writing – an important sanity check for all of us!).
All my very best wishes for a very successful second year – you really do have to succeed. David
Jun
23
Learning as Workflow
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Its been a week of travel and talk. Nothing so unusual about that, I suppose, except that you seldom learn much while doing either. Yet I have a feeling that I have learnt a great deal, and in areas where I thought I was knowledgeable. Clearly, I wasn’t!
On my way to meetings in Italy I had plenty of time to reflect on an afternoon spent with Microsoft and CUP’s Global Grid for Learning (GGfL) on Monday. The slides from my presentation will appear here under Downloads, from which you will see that I am still pursuing arguments around the atomization of learning content, and its reconstruction as teaching plans or learning journeys. This deconstruction commoditizes shared and unprotectable content, but it gives “publishers” a chance to re-emerge as educational engineers, ringmasters in assembling support services for teacher/moderators and pupil/personalized learners. Components include the need for atomized resources with which to do this (GGfL) and workflow tools to create such environments (Office 365). So you see why I was speaking between these two vendors. And how important it is as a validation of Learning as Workflow that players like this recognize the change in demand. They know that it is not all teachers who will work in this way, and that the percentage that do will exchange resources and allow others to use and adapt their work in the network. TES Connect (http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resources/) in the UK, like www.teachersPayTeachers.com in the US already facilitate this. GGfL facilitate it by clearing copyrights in advance and allowing schools the ability to keep compliant by becoming a subscriber. The more I listen to GGfL the more I recognize its absolute necessity as a business model in these emerging markets, though I can also see that larger textbook publishers, always trying to buy off change with a halfway house, might have shied away from doing this. After all, only market leaders like Pearson, in this sector, get time to use their current trading as a shelter within which to rethink their market positions and experiment. All credit then to Cambridge for this initiative. In tribute, I used the meeting to launch SABL, the Society for the Abolition of Blended Learning, and was gratified when several members of the audience asked afterwards for application forms!
And tributes were due too to Microsoft. They have their heads around the nature and dynamics of change in learning markets, and rightly see the opportunity to re-orientate the ultimately most fundamental of workflow toolsets in that direction. Already launched in the US (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/desktop-apps/2011/01/12/microsoft-readies-office-365-for-education-40091397/) this seems to me a demonstration that Sharepoint, a communications environment like Lync, a souped -up PowerPoint and the rest of the Office package take users a long way down the track towards a situation where teachers can effectively migrate to moderation. Microsoft are effectively providing a migration path that moves school users to the new tools-based environment, and this is one of the conditional factors in change in school practice.
In the desperation to sell devices much of this has been ignored in the IT sector, and even where one would expect a degree of affinity (as at Apple), specialised educational providers like Edutone (http://www.edutone.com/news_46.html) seem to be the real innovators. Platforms like this require a reworking of current resource thinking so that learning on a tablet emulates the access mode that learners – and their parents – will expect in an App orietated, post-search world. The results of this can only be multiple media (good to see many of GGfL’s allies in photo libraries and educational television in this audience). And the way personalization is done has to be unpackaged (software providers in the room like T-Learning – http://www.taecanet.com/index.htm – have now built a wealth of experience in creating millions of learning journeys and using them in virtual classroom environments).
And then the learning began, for as soon as I stopped speaking to the audience and started listening to them I realized how rich this terrain is now becoming. At one end of the spectrum there are players like Learning Possibilities (https://learningpossibilities.lpplus.net/Pages/News2.aspx), combining the visionary talents of Steve Heppell with a high value platform, LP+4, and a very appropriate recent announcement about their Education Cloud venture with Microsoft. At the other end was TimeMaps (http://www.timemaps.com/about-us/), an attempt to time chart global history by a father and son team. The Brittons will earn the gratitude of history teachers by re-inventing the historical Atlas, especially if it can be included within the personalized learning environments described here.
So what didn’t we talk about? Well, eBooks, eTextbooks and ePub3 seemed to belong more to the past than the future, though no doubt that will sort itself out in time. And the enabling technologies of eWhiteboards, LMS and VLE were taken as they should be – as givens in the educational environment – sadly we did not talk enough about the home-school dimension. As we personalize, so we have to communicate: eLearning will not achieve its full potential without far greater communication and co-operative working between parents and teachers, alongside the changing relationship between learners and teacher/moderators.
« go back — keep looking »