Feb

6

Robotic Journalism and Death Row

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

I am still rolling across America, in a journey last week from San Diego to New York (again) for the DeSilva+Phillips Media  Dealmakers Summit at the Pierre, and now on to Nashville, Tennessee. More below on the conference, but first back to a theme started in my blog “News not fit to Print”.  I am becoming obsessed with the science around automated story development, and now see it everywhere I look. And everywhere I look I see a Western culture obsessed with fact-based journalism. As in Europe, much of the core material in reportage is statistical. Today is SuperBowl Sunday and the stats are coming down like dandruff, but I already wrote about Statsheets in the previous article so lets not go there. Instead, I have a copy of the Tennessean for 6 February in front of me. Lets try that.

First off, this is a good newspaper and nothing I say is intended to denigrate it. But the urge to “factualize” is all over it. Front page headline reads “Teaching immigrants is a growing challenge”. Apparently 22% of Metro Nashville public school students now need to learn English as a second language, compared to 15% in 2005. The city has, in an annual student enrolment of 78,000, 10.692 whose first language is Spanish, 1749 Arabic, 999 Kurdish, and more more and more breakdowns until we reach the Burmese and Karens at 169 and Amharic speakers at 154. Think this is a naturally statistical story? Lets go to the local news section whose arresting headline is “Execution Drug Options Limited”. Here we learn that Tennessee has 86 inmates on death row but only enough drugs to execute 8 of them. The pre-fatal injection anesthetic sodium thiopental is not now made in the US, so State governments are having to use veterinary anesthetics or buy the drug covertly in Europe – a dealer based in a British driving school offices in London is intriguingly mentioned in this connection…

But I am getting carried away. The point is that the core “Facts” of the narrative in these stories is based on the figures, and that is where Narrative Science (http://www.narrativescience.com/) comes in. As I was writing my first story this company announced a $6 million funding round led by Battery Ventures. The company was founded by a group whose experience includes Google, Doubleclick, and computing and journalism at Northeastern at Evanston, Ill. Their idea is to take all those fact-based stories and turn the facts into computer-based narrative, create templates around their recurrence and generate a new story with each update. Employment statistics, oil production, share price movements, population change etc etc. We are constantly comparing this quarter to last, or to the same last year, or to the best or worst in the last 5, 10 or 50 years. Where these are recurrent interests a computer can write them very effectively – and, a cynic would say, is more likely to report them accurately.

And the implications of this are immense, and were brought home to me by a casual conversation last week with the digital director of a leading B2B player. He is a Narrative Science triallist and his service is due to be launched during February. He noted both the very rapid need for updates in terms of market stats in his sector, as well as the fact that standard conventions around comparisons meant that these stories were ideal for computerized updates. These too were stories that needed to be squirted quickly onto mobile platforms – comment could follow later once everyone had the core narrative. He then alluded to the cost savings and the annual cost of journalists.  I walked away with the idea in mind that the critical path to saving B2B as advertising fails to return will be a massive change in the cost base of the industry. Ironically, efforts to create a new computerized journalism at Northeastern may well end in the employment of less journalists, though those who are needed will be needed at a much higher level of intellectual input.

Finally, a footnote on the conference. My panel of B2B players were all stars (Mason Slaine, Clare Hart and Scott Schulman) but outside of them I was very taken with David Liu, CEO of the Knot and the two founders of Gilt Groupe: B2C is certainly coming into its own. But the session that made me most thoughtful was an Interview with David Levin, the CEO of UBM. His intellectually rigorous approach to a careful acquisition and disposal programme was very admirable. But is the old niche-based B2B model still available? I see Thomson Reuters creating an increasingly cross-sectoral approach as they build bridges between legal, tax and regulatory on the one hand and financial services on the other. Instead of unrelated niches are we going back to cross-selling related sectors to get growth leverage? And if we are is the Informa/UBM/EMAP model beginning to creak as these players have too little in any one niche to effectively cross-sell? Depends how you define sector and niche, of course, but we could be in line for another age of Happy Families card game swaps, aka vertical sector consolidation.

Nov

23

Here be Giants

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

The emerging world of network publishing, if found on the map of a medieval cartographer, might well be seen as a land of giants. A land far larger than that occupied by the noisy contestants of consumer publishing, or the sad and plaintive territory once dedicated to Music, it is built on foundations of  business and professional information. No one writes about it much in the press or public media (they have survival problems of their own) but if what is currently taking place on the networks does not produce the expected benefits for global businesses over the next five years, then the ability of the world economy to grow out of recession and still keep control of commercial practices will be inhibited and delayed, with adverse effects on all of us.The promised B2B revolution has to deliver real benefits in improved productivity (more done by less people with improved outcomes), better decision-making (greater security around getting all the factors lined up, and weighting them effectively) and more cost-effective compliance (greater assurance that best practice and regulatory frameworks can be implemented in practice and audited). This is a tough call, but for those who can do it there will be rich rewards.

And in this land there are Giants, and their consolidation is taking them to new places,  far away from the craft practices that we might designate as “publishing”. The largest players are consumed by the idea of workflow, and not at any trivial level of integration either. In the last six months I have been privileged to walk the territory, map in hand, sometimes only vaguely recognizing a terrain that I first explored 25 years ago, and many times since, and sometimes getting re-acquainted with old features in entirely new contexts. My conclusion is that Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier are now at a transformational stage, that there is blue water between them and the rest of the marketplace, and that if they are able to complete the transformation at significant scale they will tap into an area of  margin and revenue growth that exceeds expectations in the information services sector at present. Meanwhile their former sector competitors are still stumbling around trying to redress the past by taking content online, re-inventing advertising models and awaiting the rebirth of format publishing in the networks. It will not happen, and the wisest and best know it.

So what is happening at TR and RE which is so laudable? I have spoken of Thomson Reuters (Rebuilding Inside Out) as re-inventing the core of this huge company through the creation of workflow products and services that start by concentrating the core assets of clients and content across the legal-regulatory-financial services continuum and then creating workflow around governance, risk and compliance that first of all standardizes practices (and thus themselves become performance standards) and then become templates for applications that move out into every business marketplace. The starting points are viral, like tax and regulation. The transformation comes when these solutions, using a mix of TR content, client content and licensed third party content, become a standard enterprize software application that can be bolted into the network (internet/extranet/intranet/mobilenet) or run as SaaS in the Cloud.

This is policy -driven workflow, ensuring compliance and allowing systems to drive governance. But you can take a completely different view of this if your aspiration is to drive business functionality itself. Imagine you are in insurance markets, where RE’s LexisNexis dominate. Workflow is created around risk assessment: know your customer, verify his record, score and categorize him, reject or insure him, check his subsequent performance. The combination of Seisint and Choicepoint at Lexis, plus all the access to public record content, and then to media aggregation like Nexis, creates a bedrock solution (and one so solid that in anecdote it is possible to speak of a new market entrant into the US insurance market basing his market entry plan on this Lexis Risk platform). Where an information-fuelled solution creates the workflow format (and to do this strategic alliance can be important – Experian, for example, is a valued partner to Lexis in the US) this model can be replicated by Lexis in countless markets.

Indeed, it can be created in law markets themselves, Lexis and TR’s Westlaw have long since moved on from information as pure research in legal services. Support for law practice marketing was an early target of both. In research days in the past litigators were the great purchasers of access, so it is noteworthy to see Lexis moving on to litigation support systems – its CaseMap workflow model is now used by 99 of the AmLaw 100, the top litigators in the world. Even more noteworthy is the equal emphasis given to the business of law alongside the practise of law: when current plans are fully implemented in the next few months it is obvious that every sector/customer segment will have business workflow integration at each level of business activity (from billing and time management to marketing) as well as each sector of practise activity. So is Lexis a law publisher when it reaches this point? Or a fully integrated systems supplier with comprehensive  solutions supporting all aspects of being a lawyer? (or, if our examples came from the science sides of these businesses, of being a researcher or a medical care provider).

One driver of these changes has been competition. Would these Giants be so impressive without each other. And yet these two Giants are showing that very different approaches are possible even in a very competitive field. As they grow there will be other competitors: are these two the allies or the competitors of IBM, or Oracle, or SAP? Dramatically, Lexis has integrated all of its workflow for lawyers with Microsoft Outlook and Word, to the huge benefit of workflow integration for lawyers (and a great gain for Microsoft as law practices are forced to upgrade). And this in turn demonstates the return to the underlying network, after the Flight to the Web in the late 1990s. Workflow by definition is not a flashy web-based offering, but a series of real internet-based applications installed within the firewall. It is this sort of consideration, as well as the Apps marketplace in consumer mobile, that makes Chris Anderson ponder about the future of the Web.

Mobile and the Devices will get built into all of this (witness TR’s BoardLink for the secure retention of  board papers and director’s reports in a workflow tool for company secretaries and directors). I have a feeling that we are still closer to the beginning than the maturity of whatever this is, as well as a sense of wonderment that so many of these changes are happening around that most conservative of professions, the Law. These two players now stand well apart from the chasing pack, and have both done what seemed so unlikely only a few years ago: created a cadre of experienced managers who know digital content and business models backwards, who truly know their own customers, and who have the technical support to make good decisions. It is here, not with Jobs and Murdoch trying to write a new future for the exhausted newspaper format via the Daily, that the real future of “network (electronic) publishing” lies.

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