Nov

9

Monty’s Flagging Circus

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Oh, dear. Why, O why, when business models fail, do bankers and businessmen fall victim to the idea that if we did things bigger, cheaper, or louder then the old magic would return? These thoughts came to mind while attending Marco Rodzynek’s wonderful NOAH investment show this week: inside the hall we were all pondering how to invest in innovation, while our newscreens were full of images of David Montgomery, looking as inscrutably Calvinist as ever, getting ready to cut jobs and take the hard decisions necessary to keep the newspaper industry alive. Local World, the Montgomery vehicle, is prepared to absorb Northcliffe and the tiny Iliffe – as long as Lord Rothermere and Lord Iliffe leave some money on the table – and just about everyone else in British regional papers. The idea is that if one builds Size, and removes any local overlaps, and removes the distraction of too many advertising opportunities, and concentrate production in a handful of regional centres, and raise prices, then the regional press will once again become an attractive possibility for UK investors. Trinity Mirror are reported as havering, Johnston Press have said “no” (Ashley Highfield, its CEO, remains my best bet for “Inventor of Whatever It Is Which Replaces Local Newspapers” – remember you read it here first!). And I have to add that the last Montgomery vehicle, Mecom, did valiantly with this idea in Northern Europe before it too succumbed to circulation falls, advertising downturns, and the sad, underlying truth that not enough people of the right age like local newspapers anymore. A German victim of this process once claimed to me that Monty did  more damage to the German newspaper industry than the eponymous Field Marshal did to the German economy, but for a brief while it looked all right. Then it looked all wrong and hit the buffers.

So Local World has form. But does it have a chance? My own view, after the Fish4 experiment of the 1990s, is that the UK regional press has lost touch with “local” – and rather than rationalization, it needs to rediscover the proximity, recency and inter-activity which will characterize the services that they next offer. Just “going digital” doesn’t cut it. You can “migrate” into a cul de sac on the web – as Johnston Press have demonstrated. You can “transition” into pure opacity, as Trinity Mirror have shown. If your future is on the screen of a smartphone then even laying claim to being a newspaper may be pointless. But these businesses need to do something while they still have profits (aka re-invention time) to shelter them into the next phase. The £1 bn plus price for Northcliffe that DMGT’s board refused just six years ago now equates to a £200 m stake in Monty’s Local World. Surely that is a sign of the sands of time running out quicker towards the end of the game?

Now if Mr Montgomery had taken time out from all of this exciting dealmaking he could have encountered the future at NOAH. Not the future as described by people like Rupert Murdoch, whose online newspaper, The Daily, appears to be losing touch with its targets. The Independent last month reported it as having 120,000 unique users, while it needs, after 9 months, some 650,000 subscribers at $39.9 to break even. Smaller than the Ohio paper, the Toledo Blade, sneered the Indie, from the advantageous position of being smaller than both. They should all have sat still and listened to Jens Mueffelmann, Head of Digital at Axel Springer Verlag. Here the game is partnership and investment – not picking winners, but getting some skin in lots of activities which, as they iterate, will give direction and confidence to building futures. Can you do this as a sideshow? No, they have invested over 1 billion euro in 140 companies. Do they own everything? By no means. They always leave the management with a stake, and now partner with General Atlantic, who have 30% of the business for 237 m euro. This in turn enlarges the investment pot and brings more skills to bear on further acquisition. Axel Springer Digital Classifieds now dominate classifieds in Europe as the largest European player with 80 million uniques per month. With revenues forecast at 982 m euro, and EBITDA now edging up towards 30% something really interesting is happening here, and happening at real scale. But throughout the session the keywords were “experimentation” and “collaboration” – we are not the “colonial masters” in this new empire, said the speaker – we are a digital shareholder learning as we go.

And yet, of course, parts of Axel Springer, owner of Bild and Die Welt, really are traditional media. But they are run by businessmen prepared to stand back, listen, and catch at the drift of history. Later in the day I listened to a panel talking about television, and once more found myself  astonished by the confidence that existing players have in brands and positioning – and the enduring power of channel and broadcast and intrusive advertising. All that the television world lacks is really good metadata in order to enable a programme guide which would allow you to follow the television that you like, and arrange it into time patterns that suit you. Once that tagging can be ascribed automatically, we shall be able to test whether most people really do want to see the event when it is broadcast – or cheaper and later and ad-free. This panel was superbly complacent about piracy, and had no thought that their industry was overpricing, over-bundling, and too inflexible to change. In fact, just like the newspaper industry of the 1990s. Or the music industry. In the next three years these forerunners will seem mild exemplars compared to what happens when television unravels in the networks. Then Mr Murdoch really won’t know which section of his empire is the Good bank and which is the Bad!

Nov

1

Members of the House of Peers

Filed Under Blog, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Not another note on Open Access, surely? Well, I am sitting here on 31 October reading an article published on 1 November (how up to date can a blogger be?) in the Educause Review Online (www.educause.edu/ero/article/peerj-open-access-experiment) and I really want to convey my respect for people like Peter Binfield, who wrote it, for their huge energy and ingenuity in trying to make Open Access work. Peter’s note, “PeerJ: An Open-Access Experiment” describes the efforts that he and his PeerJ colleagues have put into the business of creating fresh business models around Open Access, which was borne without one and has always seemed to its adherents to need to be cloaked in one. Open Access has proved a far from lusty infant in many ways, but those who continue to adhere to the cause seem to feel, in their admirable and unfailing optimism, that some small tweak will suddenly create economic salvation and thus a take off into sustainable business growth.

In the case of PeerJ, the take-off vehicle is going to be a membership model. Peter Binfield co-founded the outfit in June 2012 with Jason Hoyt, former Chief Scientist at Mendeley, but the model that they feel will work owes nothing to smart algorythms. Instead, they simply launch themselves at the Author Processing Charge (APC), the way in which Gold OA has been sustained so far, and replace it by – a subscription. Now this is admittedly a personal subscription, levied on all article contributors (that is where the volume lies – in multi-authoring) and subscribers – or members as they would wish to describe them – can then continue to publish without further charges as long as they keep up their membership fees. Of course, if they join with new teams who have not previously been members then I presume we go back to zero, until those contributors are also members with a publishing history. Each contributor who pays a membership fee of $299 can publish as often as he likes: a nominal $99 contribution allows you one shot a year.

PeerJ have assembled a peer review panel of 700 “world class academics” for peer review purposes and intend to open for submissions by the end of the year. In a really interesting variation on the norm, they have put a PrePrint server alongside the service, so submissions will be visible immediately they are considered. It is not clear how much editorial treatment is involved in these processes, or indeed what “publishing” now means in this context, or indeed when a submission appears on the pre-print server. But one thing is very clear: this is not going to be peer review as it once was, but simply technical testing of the type pioneered by PloS One. Once it is established that the article conforms to current experimental good practice, then it gets “published”.

It is around this point in ventures of this type that I want to shout “Hold on a moment – do we really know what we are doing here?” I am sure that I will be corrected, but what I can currently see is a huge dilution of the concepts of “journals” and “publishing”. PeerJ starts with no brand impact. It is not conferring status by its selectivity, like Nature or Cell, or even some brand resonance like PloS. And its 700 experts, including Nobel Laureates, are being asked if the enquiry methodology was sound, not whether the result was good science or impacted the knowledge base of the discipline. PeerJ should be commended for allowing reviews by named reviewers to be presented alongside the article, but, fundamentally, this seems to me like another ratcheting downwards of the value of the review process.

Soon we shall hit bottom. At that point there will be available a toolset which searches all relevant articles against the submitted article, and awards points for fidelity to good practice or for permissable advances on established procedures. Articles where authors feel they have been misjudged can re-submit with amended input. The device will be adopted by those funding research, and once the device has issued a certificate of compliance, the article, wherever it is stored, will be deemed to have been “published”. There will be no fees and no memberships. Everything will be available to everyone. And this will introduce the Second Great Age of Publishing Journals, as the major branded journals exercise real peer review and apply real editorial services.

But something has changed now. The Editors of the Lancet or Nature or Cell have decided, in my projection, not to entertain submissions any longer. Instead they will select the articles that seem to them and their reviewers most likely to have real impact. These they will mark up to a high level of discoverability, using entity extraction and advanced metadata to make them effectively searchable at every level and section and expression within the article. Authors will have a choice when they are selected – they can either pay for the services up front or surrender their ownership of the enhanced version of the article. Since the article will be available and technically assessed already, spending more on it will seem fruitless. So we shall return to a (much smaller but equally profitable) commercial  journals marketplace. Based once again on selectivity and real, expensive peer review.

Experienced readers will have already spotted the flaw. With wonderful technologies around like Utopia Documents and other new article development activities (Elsevier’s Article of the Future) surely the new age of the article can only exist until these technologies are generalized to every institutional and research programme repository. That is true – but it will take years, and by that time the publishers will be adding even higher value features to allow the researcher’s ELN (Electronic Lab Notebook) full visibility of the current state of knowledge on a topic. Beyond that, we shall consider articles themselves too slow, and inadequate for purpose, but that is a discussion for another day.

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