Feb

4

The Master of Newsonomics

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, online advertising, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Yesterday a new book was born.  The fact that we can still write that with a common conviction that we know what happens when a book is launched is one enduring phenomenon.   The fact that the book, which describes in loving detail the end of the line for one species of news media, the newspaper, while narrating the scenarios within which a new type of news exchange in our society is being created, is another  stereotypical experience.  In short, we use the old media to describe the exit of the old media and forecast the birth of the new –  in old style.

Sometimes these books are scarcely worth reading.  Especially in America, where more banalities on business are pressed within hard covers more quickly than in any other place on Earth.  If you think this when you see “Newsonomics” by Ken Doctor in your bookstore, pick it up and read it.  This is something quite different: descriptive prose and fresh insight about the news business by someone who knows how to interview, can argue a case in lucid English, and writes with the sympathy of an insider and the distance of a practised analyst.  This is no accident.  Ken did more than 20 years, man and boy, before the mast in newspapers, and latterly in the now defunct Knight Ridder, where he had the helm in digital enterprises  in San Jose.  Here at least they took the approaching digital tsunami seriously, even if elsewhere they were unable to ride out the storm.  Ken then became a celebrated news media analyst, both on his own Content Bridges blog and for Outsell.

So this should be good.  And it does not disappoint.  Here you will find a good analysis of what happens in a media segment when the classical gatekeeper editorial role becomes diminished in Authority.  You can see here an industry contracting and consolidating as cyclical change becomes structural.  The growing disaffection of readers is matched by the inability of news providers to come up with any recognition of what their readers now want, and the people who read that disaffection most accurately are the advertisers, who quietly head off elsewhere.  Meanwhile new aggregators re-intermediate with new solutions, turning the old suppliers into secondary sources – and sometimes free sources at that. Meanwhile, readers are becoming newsmen, local is being reborn, and community in the network begins to recreate news forms which in print had taken two hundred years to evolve.  Reporters get to be bloggers, niche is more important than general and everyone is Editor.  A new form of marketing is born around viral distribution, which begins to suggest new roles for news media.  This is a great story, and it has not been told in a better analytic style than here.

By the time I came to the end I almost shed a tear for old Rupert M, struggling on past pension age to feed the family and make sense of all of this.  Ken’s analysis makes it clear to me that you cannot buy your way in (My Space-style). You have to build it and know it, experiment through failure to success.  And you cannot postpone it with a paywall, or hope that television will be immune.  In some ways the visual world of the web will sap the defences of television news more rapidly, aided by the filtering of Twitter and the super-distribution of YouTube.

By a glorious irony, Ken’s publisher is St Martins Press (Macmillan) the global super-publisher who forced little old Mom-and-Pop digital corner bookstore Amazon into a price deal that they did not want in the public interest despite the fact that it increased their margins.  This should mean that the eBook version should be out now too, but even if it isn’t, order this on Amazon or www.stmartins.com ( ISBN978-0-312-59893-8).  Worth every penny of whatever John Sargent tells Jeff Bezos it is worth.

Jan

31

We Who Serve The Machine

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

John Sargent is a good man and he is right.  I have been wanting to write that sentence ever since I read his full page letter to staff and authors yesterday which explained why Macmillan titles are no longer available via Amazon.  I shall go on searching out and selecting Macmillan titles and, as in the past, writing with respect when I think, as with Tor, that they are innovating at the front of a fast developing market.

And I hugely respect the innovatory skills of Amazon and the profound impact they have had on the accessibility of books.  However, Amazon cannot be allowed to use its muscle to collapse wholesaling into retailing and eat the margins accruing in a way that threatens the independence of producers.  Amazon is a good online bookseller: it is unsafe for us and them to become good publishers and agents as well.  It is the tendency of networks to collapse real world workflow models and disintermediate players who lack the ability to compete online.  That is a tendency which must be monitored closely in competition law, not because of intellectual property ownership issues, but because the public interest does not always equate with the delivery of supply chain economies.

Wonderful thing , the digital world: by the time I got this online, Amazon had capitulated to Macmillan.  This is sensible and progressive, but  it forces me therefore to  put the rest of the blog as a sort of italicized afterthought below !

I wanted to write this yesterday , but I was fighting a personal battle with the Machine all day and was too self-absorbed to set digit to keyboard.  In the first instance , on arrival at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 I found out that my ESTA travel authorization to visit the USA had expired the previous day.  Quick sprint (imagine the sight!) to Caffe Nero at the other end of the terminal to find an internet access point (BA does not do wireless in Departures).  Online to the US Embassy and its four screen form: what was my grandmother’s maiden name and  have I entered my inside leg measurement correctly?  New reference number is attained, so back to the 40 minute check-in queue (this is BA , the UK near monopoly supplier and holder of my 640,000 Air Miles, which can never be spent unless you can book travel a year in advance).  And so on board and ten hours pass, only to find out from an amused  immigration official at San Francisco that on my visa waiver form I appear not to have notified the USA of my gender.  Back to the end of another long line.
And then the joys of a wonderful downtown hotel room.  But Internet Explorer will not allow me to access the Web via the local WiFi.  Technical Support is baffled – the only solution is to go out and get a USB stick, download FireFox from a hotel machine, and load it up onto my machine.  And it works, as I speak to you now.
Why all this incidental travel chat?  Simply to demonstrate that big is mostly stupid and often bad.  That applies to governments and airlines and to Microsoft, and equates with our familiar experience of the world.  I experienced this long before becoming a publisher: at the age of 18 , with responsibility for 80 bacon pigs, I first encountered the brutal truth about price control from a Unilever subsidiary called Walls, and British farmers have become experts in the area as they face the collusive anti-competitive behaviour of the supermarkets.
The only real answer to all of this for publishers is to get to know customers intimately and sell to them directly and cost effectively.  Disintermediate the disintermediators.  And this is possible – Tor demonstrates it, and Nature in the Macmillan group demonstrates it further.  And , from other publishers who also face the same threats , a little collusive anti-competitive behaviour might be in order as well.  After all, when it came to the silly business of delaying eBook publication dates, publishers seemed pretty collusive, even if no one could accuse them of plotting together (!).
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