Oct
7
The End of Editing?
Filed Under Blog, data analytics, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, STM, Uncategorized | 2 Comments
If you are near Hall 4.0 at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Friday this week at 10 am, do yourself a favour, take an hour out from frenetic rights trading, and consider for a moment one of the critical issues of publishing as an industry in our times: does editing still matter in a digital world, and if it does, who should be doing it? And it is not just an issue of rational organisation and growing margins. For those who have invested a lifetime here, the litany of job titles (copy editor, sub-editor, commissioning editor, managing editor, executive Editor in my own case) recognises the scope of the editing function from selection of what to publish through to the preparation and validation of the published material. It recognises that “editor” has often meant “marketing manager” in some circumstances. And we should nor forget that all those grades and variations in editorial job titles demonstrate the willingness of publishing management to trade a new job title when what was requested was a pay rise!
I wanted to be there to moderate the debate in Hall 4.0. Instead a slipped disc has me on my back, but more than adequately replaced by David Attwooll of David Attwooll Associates (www.attwoollassociates.com), who knows the changing structures of the publishing business far better than most of us. Together with Dr Sven Fund, who runs Walter de Gruyter, and Dr Helmut Pesch of Lubbe this session will explore a question that would have made our publishing grandfathers blanch. Is editing the core of our business, or even a core competence?
One characteristic of a life in publishing is the decline of editorial standards debate. As soon as a new acquaintance realises that you are connected to the trade, then begins the chorus of criticism around standards: in your new friend’s youth, there were no literals in printed books, all the facts were always correct, the index was extensive and the bibliography was right up to date, and above all, the stream of inadequate drivel and trivia now published with fanfares at Frankfurt would have been strangled at birth. The latter comments are pure marketing, and relate to age and changing tastes. The former claims, discounted for failing memory, reflect something very odd about our industry. In a place where brand is mostly invested in the author, and seldom in the publisher imprint (OUP and Penguin may be the exceptions), editorial standards in regard to content preparation can only have been important as a way of attracting authors. Now that we are in an agent and author auction-based world the publisher surely has every right to demand a finished product, edited and ready for publication, and thus we see the trend towards editorial work moving out of publishing houses and going freelance or outsourced.
So the role of the consumer publisher devolves to Investor+Marketeer. Would Max Perkins or Dick Seaver find employment? They would probably work for literary agents , who may or may not be interested in investing in re-shaping and rewriting on the heroic scale of these two representatives of the Great Age of Editing (1925-1960) But notice that none of these changes in the business of publishing has a specifically digital edge. And none of them brings self-publishing into the equation. Yet in a publishing world dominated by these factors, Amazon can offer freelance services to would-be self-publishers, who can also buy into a huge range of specialised self-publishing bureaux, from Blurb to eternity. Editorial standards could improve in an EaaS world. Matching systems derived from the dating world could match editor with author. Fact-checking in a data analytics world will be automated, leaving the editor with the task of resolving clashes of opinion or fact.
And all of this may be fine for consumer publishing, but where does it leave educational, or academic or professional publishing, where there have long been disputes about who is responsible? In the early years of this century I was often told that the end of the publisher role in peer review meant the end of the STM publisher. While the glory days of late 1990s +45% ebitda are now long departed, there is no major journals publisher who is not now an important Open Access publisher. More recently, we have been told that the reason why commercial publishers are more expensive than other routes to market is a result of their high editorial added value. They both improve the accuracy and the literacy of the finished article while ensuring that it’s linking and citing functions work immaculately. Metadata may be the answer; if publishers can prove that they can make content more discoverable and improve user access then surly here is a line of defence for traditional publishing process – the digital need coming to the rescue of the craft industry of copy preparation! While academics debate their article publishing strategy (PLoS One -cheap and quick , but peer review only reaches to validation of methodology Versus Publisher – expensive and slow but thorough in terms of mark-up and metadata) the choices may come down to how quickly these articles are needed in the academic marketplace and whether the research is funded by an institution willing to pay for the editorial added value. And if the editing funding is available is it best spent with the publisher or one of a host of specialised agencies (often created by unemployed publishers’ editors) who can be competitively cheaper and faster?
Or why not just let the crowd do it? The insane desire of the human race to point out the deficiencies of others is so readily channeled into crowd-sourcing that we have turned the vice of promulgating ill-prepared communications and pushing them into the public space into the virtues of crowd-editing in the Age of Wikipedia. And it does work very well, until you reach the point of “who edits the editors?”. Then you find yourself back in St Paul’s Churchyard in London in the eighteenth century, where booksellers like Thomas Longman were protecting their migration to publishing and basing their attractiveness to authors upon the better presentation of their works… publishing does move in some very full circles.
Sep
20
Elite – Or Just Smug?
Filed Under Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
We all do it. Give me a platform, and I can be as arrogant as the next man. Tell me I am an expert, and ten minutes later I am telling you what to do. This is a harmless facet of most conferences, but in meetings about education it has a particularly nasty side effect. We are not just harmlessly telling our fellow professionals what to do, but prescribing remedial medicine in the only place that can save our world – the education of our children. Before starting a speech in this area we need to take a long drink of Essence of Humility!
Perhaps limping along on a stick with a bad back proved a levelling experience, but I found at the opening day agenda of the ELIG (European Learning Industry Group) Annual Conference in London on Thursday a level of smugness which might have typified the English at their arrogant worst, but which was unexpected in an international body combining expertise from across the entire continent. This was certainly untypical of their meetings: I have supported them from their foundation 12 years ago since I believe strongly that all components of the education industry need to sit together and talk. The nature of a networked society means exchange of roles and consolidation of different supply chains, so the more voices we have around the table the better the outcomes for the eventual beneficiaries – the learners – upon whom all our futures depend. And I shall continue advocacy for ELIG despite this meeting, in the hope that we get things better over the next decade.
It might have been the opening speaker who set the unfortunate tone. Adrian Wooldridge, Management Editor at the Economist, is a very considerable expert himself, as a journalist and commentator. As one of those speakers who keynote from the “I am not actually an expert in education myself but here is my plain man’s view of what has gone wrong and what we should put right…” viewpoint, he tended to sound more like an under-briefed politician than like someone with an illuminating angle of expertise. His theme, that the role of the teacher is sacrosanct and effective education can be aided by machines but always depends eventually upon what can be passed from a human teacher to a learner, may, as he said, have been formed by his own experience at Balliol and All Souls. But, he said, while his own university had only been founded in the eleventh century, the true model for education was Plato and Aristotle.
What the delegates from Pearson or IBM or Intel or several younger European universities in the audience made of this I could not tell. But it does not hold out much hope in a world where teaching is not a one on one or one on two tutorial experience. It sounds vaguely insulting in a country where classroom sizes now move firmly back over 30 as a result of cutbacks. And it sounds hugely arrogant in a world where the only hope that many will have of any form of educational achievement will be on a digital network.
But it could have been the following speaker, Chris Dede, Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard, who confirmed the tone. No one listening could have doubted the level of expertise here. Professor Dede speaks with massive authority in his field and produced useful illumination on a whole range of issues. But, as a Professor at Harvard, he knows only too well that we have got everything wrong, that no one has ever acted on the evidence that he and his peers have produced, and that no one ever will. So much of the experimentation with new forms is mostly misguided and eventually doomed to failure – and MOOCs are a classic example of this. Shortly afterwards he was joined by a panel of policy makers and entrepreneurs, and reverted to this critical line. How could it be, they agreed, exchanging smug smiles of superior wisdom, that no one had noted that this business model was a failure? How could it be, they lamented, that so much money had been invested and spent on such chancy, get-rich-quick adventures in education?
As the panel turned into a bonding exercise for a group who knew what policies should be adopted and how the world might be better organized and regulated for the education of the unwashed masses, I began to reflect on how far we had strayed – in this conference room and in the industry at large – from the real nature of education in a networked society. We – the experts, the professors, the journalists, the regulators, the businessmen – are still trying to prescribe, to push onto the learner the shape and structure of learning. Yet we have always known that learning is something you pull towards you. Secretly we all know that we learn best what we want to learn, that curricula and examinations are less effective than desire and learning hunger. And we also know that much of our most effective learning is acquired from fellow-learners – it is a deeply collaborative process.
In a networked society, for the first time in history, pull is stronger than push in education. What is remarkable about MOOCs is not failing business models – it is the millions and millions of people who signed up all over the world, and are still doing so, and will continue to do so until we can satisfy them more effectively with better learning experiences. And whether the experience contains video, powerpoint, remote group collaboration, scarce live teacher resources online or anything else is not important at all. The network is not only pull-dominated, but it is, in its very nature, iterative. MOOCs are version 1.1: before ELIG meets again, they will have re-iterated and changed. The joy of the world we are now moving into is that it is deeply user – sensitive, and success comes to those who tweak and change in ways that users recognize as beneficial – to them. So come on, Professors of Education and influential, opinion forming Journalists, join us in the networked self-educating society! But there I am, prescribing for others again. I just hope they encounter a MOOC one day that makes all these things clear.
« go back — keep looking »