Jan

21

Acting Editors and Play-Acting Moguls

Filed Under Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

If the play is the thing to test the conscience of the King, then the Emperor of Wapping is in for a tough time. The Times and the Sunday Times in the UK are now in the News Corp Bad Bank, and Wall Street very understandably says that “something must be done” about the continuing losses at Times Newspapers. My friend and colleague, Ken Doctor, clear leader in the critical analysis of newspaper prospects in the US, is an optimist. He sees growing revenues from online advertising and digital subscriptions slowly filling the gap and eventually pulling a reconstructed press out of the mire. Mr Murdoch should surely read him attentively as one of the few hopeful auguries on the market, but it is hard to apply Ken’s logic, which may work for major US regionals, at The Times. There the only medicine that anyone seems to imagine will work is more cuts to the scarred and bleeding body of the Old Thunderer. The three act drama we have been watching for the past few months has now reached Act 2 , but based on the form of the playwright, I am privileged to offer you a peek at the final act (and leave it to you to decide whether this is comedy or tragedy – or farce).

Act 1 opened on a dark heath, at night. Six shadowy figures, half witches, half warlocks, stirred a pot, uttering incantations, as their leader dipped his pen into the broth and used it as ink. “Yes”, said Rupert Pennant Rea, for it is he “this evidence to Leveson will ensure that we six independent National Directors of Times Newspapers will never be overlooked again. Here we remind the noble Lord that we were created in 1981 as trustees in the public interest, independently appointed and self-appointing: no editor can be appointed or fired without our agreement .” Exeunt All, and then we find ourselves in the Imperial Court, where His Majesty, Digger II, sits restlessly on the Imperial Chair, reading a profit and loss account. “By the Guns of Gallipoli and my father’s scoops”, he shouts “I will abolish red ink with red blood. Send for Harding of the Times and Witherow of the Sunday Times and make them Accountable!” As the supplicant editors are dragged into the presence, each man is asked what he will sacrifice to make red ink black. One voice pleads for more independence, an end to new print plants in Essex. The other, more experienced player insinuates the thought that it would be cheaper to run the two newspapers together, to have one newsroom, one accounts department, one sales and marketing presence – and one editor. “You have it!, cries the Emperor, “that is exactly what I would have said , and now I come to think of it, it is exactly what I did say. Since I cannot recall if one of you said it, lets assume it was me. But we certainly don’t want bright young things around here like you, Harding, so you are fired. Meanwhile, loyal and long-serving Witherow, you shall be our chief of editors of all our newspapers. Let the cuts commence…!”

Act 2 brings us back to the Heath, as Rupert P-R briefs his colleagues. “How can this have happened! The Emperor knows that we have rights of approval. Put out a press release showing that Witherow is only acting until we have considered carefully whether this man who we have known and worked with as the editor of one of our newspapers for a decade is suitable to edit the other. But we must be honoured in the breach, or Wapping Wood shall never come to Dun-Insane!”. And then the scene changes, and we open a new one as the Emperor screams “Only acting! Who do they think they are. That agreement I made with Ken Thomson is over thirty years old. Send runners to the people we helped into office to run this accursed country, and ask for a Private member’s Bill to abolish this arrangement. I must be free!”

Of course, I have made all this up and shockingly put words into everyone’s mouths, and I must ask the forgiveness of the innocent when I have traduced them. But, is this really any way to make newspapers pay? If they cannot be run at a profit, why have them at all? Over at DMGT they clearly have no doubts about selling the whole of Northcliffe into Local Worlds. While I do not want to argue that the Times is more important than the Leicester Mercury, I do want to suggest that the way to cure their ills is to re-focus on the behaviour of the customer. David Montgomery, Chairman of Local Worlds, was quoted today in the Telegraph as saying that he would “stop the trend of cost cutting for the sake of cost-cutting”, despite claiming to be “leaving the industrial baggage of print behind”. This too seems to me not to answer the question of how people with networked access will want to be drip fed news and update locally, regionally or nationally.

And so, Act 3. The runners return to the Emperor, saying that the government politely declined. “After the phone hacking scandal, and the allegations of business closeness between the erstwhile CEO of News International and the Prime Minister, this may be an inopportune moment to be seen to be helping the Chairman get out of agreements that he willingly got into.” So the Emperor decides just to go on acting, and refusing to appoint or approve new national directors just as they refuse to approve his editors until the whole cast list approaches retirement or a more final exit – and then they stop arguing for a moment and turn round and find that – the Times has ceased to exist in print. One of those plays then that started as a comedy, became a farce in Act 2, yet turned eventually to tragedy.

Dec

28

Scraps and Jottings

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Workflow | 1 Comment

We had a wonderful Christmas, thanks, – and I hope that you, Dear Reader, did likewise. Immediately afterwards (dawn on Boxing Day) we departed for Nova Scotia to bring greetings to my Canadian mother-in-law – and drove into a violent snowstorm on the Halifax-Lunenburg road which completely wiped my mental tapes of what I was going to do by way of a year end communication. I only recall that I had promised one reader that I would try not to be so apocalyptic in 2013. Well, here then is a first attempt at a lulling, measured message to that individual: “Have no fears for the future – the disruptions that you might have countered are now fully in play, and the only thing we now await is the full effect!”

As I dashed from the Hut on Boxing Day, I picked up two clippings that curiously underline this theme. The first, and Cureus (pronounced Curious) is its name, refers to the announcement of a new Open Source medical journal launched by a Stanford neurosurgeon (http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2012/12/19). We could, if we wished, take Cureus as an example of the imminent demise of journal publishing in the sciences. Dr John Adler, its progenitor, appears to have at least two issues with current publishing procedures. On the one hand he complains that research results need to be made available immediately: “allowing researchers to publish their findings at no cost within days, rather than the months or even years that it typically takes for research to be made public”. And on the other hand he is an opponent of traditional peer review who wants to crowd source opinion on an article from both expert and non-expert readers. “Nowadays you wouldn’t go to a restaurant without Yelping it first. You wouldn’t go to see a movie without seeing what Rotten Tomatoes had to say about it. But medical journals are stuck in this 200-year-old paradigm.”

So in fact the delightful thing about Cureus is that it ignores both Open Access as practised by PloS and by commercial publishers, or even by the technical evaluation favoured by PloS One, and demands a further level of democratization of access at the same time. “The average Joe has little or no access to the medical literature today. Its a right. Its a human right”. This would delight the early Open Access campaigners in the US, but the crowd source idea is more valuable than the access by non-academic users. We now have a raft of innovations, some of them going back to the Dotcom Boom, which, if fully applied to current publishing processes, would have a hugely disruptive effect. Are we looking at a time when both conventional Journal publishing and newly “conventional” Open Access publishing are both overtaken by the delayed “boomerang” effect of network publishing procedures now taken for granted elsewhere?

I have the same reaction to a wonderful piece by Bill Rosenblatt, a doyen of internet rights commentators, in a piece on 15 December 2012 (http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/15). Entitled “The Right to Re-Sell: A ticking Time Bomb over Digital Goods”, Bill makes two critical points that will be very important on the 2013 agenda. In the first instance, most music and eBook products are now sold without DRM. DRM files were hated by users and arguably created more customer services issues than they were worth. So while legal embargoes on resale or re-use remain in everyone’s licences, the physical barrier has largely disappeared. File transfer between friends – “I’ll loan you that book when I have finished it” – is allegedly commonplace, though I have seen few attempts at quantification. Bill doesn’t offer any, since he has bigger game in his sights. He has been looking at ReDigi (www.redigi.com), a music resale service. This includes a forward – and – delete function so that the company can protect itself against the whole idea that it is a front for IP theft , but could well become the Chegg of the music industry.

Bill’s other issues concern ORI (the Owners Rights Initiative grouping) whose membership brings libraries and resellers together in unholy alliance to lobby for protection against litigious publishers under the slogan “You bought it, You own it”. (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/you-bought-it-you-own-it-owners-rights-initiative-launches-to-protect-consumers-rights-175435921.html) And here lies the fundamental point that I distil from Bill’s piece. As we moved into the networked world we never resolved the fundamental issue about intellectual property ownership. After 500 years of print reproduction, we thought that we could still own the the content and control its re-use. And we are still trying to do that in a network of users who adhere to a completely different view of ownership. They think that a digital object is synonymous with a physical one, and having successfully ignored or evaded the law in the real world of real objects, they will be able to do exactly the same in the virtual world.

Meanwhile, the current world of digital offers just about every variant on lending and resale rights that one might possibly imagine. And the belwether world of journal publishing illustrates yet further variation on the theme of open network publishing. For publishers and those who aspire to recreate publishing, the key remains how you add value to processes that were once your sole domain, but which now can be performed anywhere by anyone with network access. The key to 2013 remains as it has for the last 20 years: understand how users want to behave in the network, and get there before demand chrysalises with appropriate value adding proposals that they will want to pay for. Next year, as in all those years “just publishing” will not be enough.

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