Apr

27

Open Up Your APIs!

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments

In this industry five years is enough to benchmark fundamental change. This week I have been at the 9th Publishers’ Forum, organized as always by Klopotek, in Berlin. This has become, for me, a must attend event, largely because while the German information industry is one of the largest in Europe, German players have been marked by a conservative attitude to change, and a cautious approach to what their US and UK colleagues would now call the business model laws of the networked information economy. At some level this connects to a deep German cultural love affair with the book as an object, and how could that not be so in the land that produced Gutenburg? On another level, it demonstrates that German business needs an overwhelming business case justification to institute change, and that it takes a time for these proofs to become available. Which is not to say that German businesses in this sector have not been inventive. An excellent two part case study run jointly by Klopotek and de Gruyter was typical: de Gruyter are the most transformed player in the STM sector because they have seized upon distribution in the network and selling global access as a fast growth path, and Klopotek were able to supply the necessary eCommerce  and back office attributes to make this ambition feasible. And above all, in a room of more than 300 newspaper, magazine and book executives, we were at last able to fully exploit the language and practice of the network in information handling terms. This dialogue would have been impossible in Germany five years ago. A huge attitudinal change has taken place. Now we can deploy our APIs and allow users to get the value and richness of our content, contextualised to their needs, instead of covering them with the stuff and hoping they get something they want.

In some ways the Day 2 Keynote from Andrew Jordan, CTO at Thomson Reuters GRU business, exemplified the extent of this. The incomparable Brian O’Leary had started us off on Day 1 in good guru-ish style by placing context in its proper role and reminding us that it is not content as such but its relationships that increasingly concern us. You could not listen to him and still believe that content was the living purpose of the industry, or that the word “publishing” had not changed meaning entirely. With Michael Healy of CCC and  Peter Clifton of +Strategy following him to hammer home the new world of collaboration and licencing, and the increasing importance of metadata in order to identify and describe tradeable entities, we were well on the way towards a recognition of new realities, ferried there before dinner by Jim Stock of MarkLogic using the connected content requirements of BBC Sport in an Olympic year to get us started in earnest on semantic approaches to discovery and our urgent needs to create appropriate platform environments to allow us to use our content fluently in this context.

So the ground was well-prepared for Andrew Porter. He took us on a journey from the acquisition of ClearForest by Reuters while it was being acquired by Thomson, to the use of this software by the new company to create OpenCalais, allowing third parties (over 60 of them) to get into entity extraction (events and facts, essentially) and then into the creation of complex cross-referencing environments, and finally to the use of this technology by Thomson Reuters themselves in the OneCalais and ContentMarketplace environments. So here was living proof of the O’Leary thesis, on a vast scale, building business-orientated ontologies, and employing social tagging in a business context. Dragging together the whole data assets of a huge player to service the next customer set or market gap. And no longer feeling obliged to wrap all of this in a single instance database, but searching across separately-held corporate datasets in a federated manner using metadata to find and cross-reference entities or perform disambiguation mapping. Daniel Mayer of Temis was able to drive this further and provide a wide range and scale of cases from a technology provider of note. The case was made – whether or not what we are now doing is publishing or not, it is fundamentally changed once we realize that what we know about what we know is as important as our underlying knowledge itself.

And of course we also have to adjust our business models and our businesses to these new realities – patient Klopotek have been exercising expertise in enabling that systems re-orientation to take place for many years. And we must recognize that we have not arrived somewhere, but that we are now in perpetual trajectory. One got a real sense of this from an excellent presentation to a very crowded room by Professor Tim Bruysten of richtwert on the impact of social media, and, in another way, from Mike Tamblyn of Kobo when he spoke of the problems of vertical integration in digital media markets. And, in a blog earlier this week, I have already reported on the very considerable impact of Bastiaan Deplieck of Tenforce.

Speaking personally, I have never before attended a conference of this impact in Germany. Mix up everything in the cocktail shaker of Frank Gehry’s great Axica conference centre alongside the Brandenburg Gate, with traditional book publishers rubbing shoulders with major information players, and chatting to software gurus, industry savants, newspaper and magazine companies, enterprize software giants and business service providers and you create a powerful brew in a small group. Put them through seperate German and English streams, then mix them up in Executive Lounge seminars and discussion Summits and the inventive organizers give everyone a chance to speak and to talk back. This meeting had real energy and, for those who look for it, an indication that the changes wrought by the networked economy and its needs in information/publishing terms, now burn brightly in the heart of Europe.

Apr

22

Who Needs Editors?

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Its the language that gets you first. CEO in “brutal cull” of Johnston Press editors (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/12/scotsman-editor-in-chief-johnston-press) is a great way to treat editors and subs as they have always treated the world – with a degree of lofty disdain. And I did not really catch on to the deep underlying question until I read Peter Preston’s commentary on this (Observer 22 April, 2012). I usually regard that great ex-Guardian editor as my sanity check, so it was a real shock to find that he had it completely wrong too. No commentary that I have seen has grasped the essence of what Ashley Highfield is doing by this mass firing of senior (and very expensive) editorial potentates at Johnston, or what it realistically recognizes about the nature of news online.

Let me first declare an initial prejudice. During a five year tenure as non-executive Chairman of Fish4, when it was owned by the regionals themselves, it was my observation that Editors were an embattled barrier to digital progress. This is a dangerous generalization, but invariably Editors wanted to run Web presence as if it were the newspaper, were reluctant in those days to allow their own digital media to scoop the paper, used their role as protectors and developers of the brand to diminish and hold down their digital presence, and all too often regarded digital as a subordinate medium which must reflect and emulate print, not create an entirely new approach to the way in which news and comment is digested and responded to by its ultimate users.

So I love Ashley for doing this. It would have been a shade better if he had used Cromwell’s words when dismissing the Rump Parliament – “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ be gone …” and, pointing to the green eyeshade rather than the mace – …”and take that bauble with you.” But one cannot have it all. At a stroke, some mighty expenses have returned to the bottom line and a space has been cleared where the CEO can set to work re-inventing the company. So why will he get closer to getting it right without editors than with them?

It is the nature of digital news services to replace the editor by the reader. The key considerations are concerned with collecting information and relating it to the interests and needs of a targetted audience. Writing stories needs sub-editorial skills, but a great deal of future story creation will be automated (I have already commented here on Narrative Science and Selerity). The critical marketing input will be the interfaces offered to users to customize and personalize the content flow. The key feature of that activity will be the mark-up, tagging and metadata added to the content in process of uploading. The editorial function will be ensuring its accessibility by everyone, whatever their angle of approach. The skill will come in making those interfaces appetising – a marketing role and not an editorial one if ever I saw one. And a role performed by the same marketing team who will manage the digital brand and explain what it is.

At this point I hear Mr Preston straining to get into the argument, for his article is all about the importance of the “leader” article, and the controversy which Polly Toynbee attracts with her views as a commentator in the Guardian. I have no doubt at all that Miss Toynbee, who is, or deserves to be, a national institution, will glide controversially forward through time until she reaches her own Diamond Jubilee. And online we shall have many of her ilk. Lots of bloggers, many outraged citizens, lots of local councillors defending the indefensible, and pressure and lobbying groups special pleading all over the place. And we shall have all of the social media and social tagging attributes that run alongside this. This flow of activity will be open to all and separate from the news flow – something which newspapers cannot seem to manage. In the process of story selection and arrangement throughout the paper, they editorially flavour the news, giving it a “meaning” to readers even though the reader is buying the proposition of fair and proper treatment.

Which brings me to the Editorial page itself. If the views available online are catholic and wide-ranging, and multi-sourced – then finding out what the newspaper or its online version thinks is irrelevant, and Mr Preston, in a circumspect way, seems to be approaching this view as well. I would go further and ask what place the Editorial column has had in the regional press in the past two decades. In truth it has been the most unread section of the paper and has no place at all online. Do I know what the view of the Bucks Free Press is on Mr Murdoch? No, and it would mean little if it did have a view. And I would find it out of place on my smartphone or tablet. Do you, like me, smile when you come across the comment column in the Waste and Pollution Management Journal and find them battling with the issues of the day? And, like me, you probably have that experience less often now, because the editorial pitch, the idea that the organ has to stand its brand value behind a clear profile of views and arguments, has almost gone, and with it went the need for the editors whose pride and joy the curation of those views once were.

Change has a price, but I could argue that Mr Murdoch, aided and abetted by his chums Mr Coulson and the Flame Haired Temptress, got there first by turning the Sun, the NoW and eventually the Old Thunderer itself into another way of expressing the powerful urges of a controlling proprietor. But he did not do this to the regional press or the B2B subscription magazine: they did it to themselves. Ashly Highfield has recognized that, and what he must do if he is to start over, and this clearing of the decks is a very appropriate starting point.

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