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.
Aug
18
Forever Blowing Bubbles
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
It must be mid-holiday season again. While our minds are elsewhere, journalists are licensed to inflate and selectively invoke evidence of boom and bubble, to the point where we have all lost sight of reality in our wonderment that investor X has valued the start-up Y at $15 billion, before it has earnt a cent or its founders used a razor. Charles Arthur, a very knowledgeable technology journalist, set off down this track on Sunday in The Observer (17 August 2014).”New tech bubble – or new business model?” argues that bubbles may be harmful, but Arthur is too clever to do exactly what the silly season demands and write an article that gets liberal-minded readers pursing their lips and wondering if we really want all this new media technology, and whether bubbles threaten the economy just when the Brits have restored growth through a consumer housing purchase bubble. He knows as well as the rest of us that neither boom nor bubble nor bust accurately describe what has happened since the mid 1990s.
When we look back on the post-internet investment scene we will see that future technology became the bargaining card of present technology. In each five year period those who had succeeded in the previous period were forced to buy into the next generation in order to persuade investors post-IPO that they were not going to be overtaken by events. This inevitably involves paying silly prices for as yet undeveloped assets. Some of those bets will work, others will only work after constant re-iteration and when the market is ready for them. Some will fail and be quietly buried in the place where Mr Murdoch put My Space. But this is not bubble culture – it is building value in the only way that this market understands. This is never going to become “more realistic”, since by its nature it has to be unrealistic to persuade us that it is serious.
But blow away the bubble talk and serious things really are happening. For a start, the UK football (soccer) authorities have suddenly discovered that users are recording highlights (you know, those rare moments when someone actually scores a goal in the beautiful game with the ugly manners) and putting them on social media, where they are passed from hand to hand to no pecuniary advantage to the authorities. These administrators must be related to Rip van Winkle – where have they been dozing all these years? And waking up and saying this must stop is not an answer. On the other hand, making it easier to do legally within a package offered by football to enhance user enjoyment could be a great move. Yet, this is happening in the context of a shrinkage in the revenues generally earned from video, as the same network-invoked sharing capacity does to video what it has done to every media form. I was very excited by an article by Liam Boluk in Media Redefined (http://www.mediaredefined.com/a-redef-original-if-video-is-b-668292818.html?curator=MediaREDEF) kindly drawn to my attention by Neil Blackley. This demonstrates in great detail the revenue decline in video, and shows us the inflationary and deflationary trends we really should be watching. Not who is paying over the odds for what, but what are users doing with this media avalanche that their networks now provide, and how do they value it.
So it is simply not enough to look at the video market and say it is all down to Netflix spoiling the party. Netflix was one of the over-valued start-ups a few years ago that journalists in mid-summer page fillers called empty bubbles. Liam Boluk points out how cheap US TV, wherever you tap into it, now is – and how very unproductive the licensing deals done by Disney et al have proved to be. He might have said how commoditized it now seems – unless you actually want a seamless palimpsest of low value advertising and entertainment, without the effort of selection, most channel based offerings in many parts of the world feel the same. Mr Boluk points out that the average US home spends less on video entertainment today than it did in 1998, although volume consumed has risen. He says that the value of consumer rentals and purchases,”which are critical to profitability for almost all content owners”, have fallen by a third in this period. Are we sure that the bubble is in the pricing of Snapchat, or in the Murdoch bid for Time Warner?
Is there a solution to all of this? Having stood, like old Tiresias, amongst the burning towers of Fleet Street and the regional press, having observed the desperate attempts of the book world to innovate without changing the business model, having watched the humbling and consolidation of the music industry, having witnessed the decay of business and professional media in print and the decline and fall of value in advertising markets universally, it is tempting to say No. But clearly that would be very wrong. Mr Boluk says the way forward for video is to find new ways of telling stories. And to find it in new forms in fields like mobile, and not just by reheating the archive product.
And how right he is. He cites the Virtual Reality player Oculus Rift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift) as an example. While no one yet knows whether the Rift headset will succeed, the Facebook purchase, worth up to $2 billion if it earns out, will underline Facebook’s determination to stay a front line player as it too becomes commoditized – and to re-assure its investors of that intent. And VR is one of those many areas where huge promise is recognized, but constant iteration is needed to get closer and closer to the awakening pulse of the user. What we are watching here is a ceaseless beating of waves on a shoreline as a tide comes in, and a hugely exciting “after media” marketplace is revealed. No bubbles here at all.
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