Feb
17
Speaking with Voices
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
I have to be “moved to speak”, which is why the progress of this blog is so jerkily irregular. A childhood fascination with George Whitefield, the eighteenth century hedge preacher in my native Gloucestershire, taught me about the compulsion to speak out. Whitefield once spoke to a crowd of 10,000 (it is said) at Kingswood outside Bristol, and “men and women answered his call with their voices, compelled to speak as the spirit moved them”. (My father preferred the more refined oratory of the nineteenth century society preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who reduced vast audiences to tears, but my father’s daily observances were more moved by prunes than prayer so I take this reference lightly.)
You are being taken down this track by someone under pressure, from friends and colleagues, allegedly “interested in what you will say about the sale of the Guardian’s regional newspapers.” I am not so moved. The deal is trivial and, given the UK regional press, inevitable. The consideration is only interesting if you recall that two years ago DMGT refused an offer of £1 billion for its Northcliffe regional company: valued at the the price point established by this latest deal they would now get, by my calculation, £220 million. One of the disadvantages of reserving all voting rights to A shareholders, and they all being family and friends, is that you lock in a sentimental regard for the past as well as defending yourself against predators. Meanwhile, back at the Guardian, we have all long acknowledged that the not-for-profit trust at GMG can only act to protect the newspaper. More locked in sentiment. The Guardian has 37 million registered online users, but exists to keep the print. Then I, who love the paper, say turn print into the offshoot of the web and create custom newspapers deliverable from local print centres working on contract to deliver to subscribers within 12 hours of customization. The next attack must be on the print works.
But the voices I am really moved to write about are on mobile phones. Two discussions this week convince me that we are not taking the mobile or the mobile network seriously enough. We are still in the Stone Age of mobile content. Is there not something faintly ridiculous about Steve Jobs telling the media last week that they were doing a grand job, and their content was ” invaluable”? And the media having an attack of the shivers about Apple not giving them enough user data, or allowing them to connect print or web subscriptions to the Apple store subscription. Truth to tell, I cannot think of a single media property that is “have to have” on an iPad. You buy the device , and then it is “nice” to be able to read a Murdoch newspaper on it (possibly nicer there than anywhere, given the obliterating possibilities of “delete”). Sports Illustrated seems to be taking the platforms of mobility seriously, but for the most part inflexible real world content , or lightly reheated web content is the menu on offer. When the content/service/solution is so hot that you can give away the reader with the subscription, then we will know that we have cossed the great divide. Until then, the content industry just has a crossed line.
So who does know anything about this? Well , the B2B boys are well down the track. Here is the voice of the head of IT at the US insurer Nationwide, talking to the FT about his mobile apps: “For the best experience, it is better not to have a web-based version [of the application] but one that is specific, depending on what the user is doing. It is about having right functionality.”
“It is not just a question of designing applications so they fit on a mobile device’s smaller screen, he says, but providing the right amount of task-specific information to field-based staff. Too often, re-purposed PC or web applications produce cluttered screens, and frustrated users.”
So this will be our test bed. B2B publishers will want to quickly integrate content into mobile workflow models. Apps will become cheaper and cheaper to originate and customize and a great deal of current workflow and process content work will migrate into mobile, after existing for a while in both fixed line and mobile networks. Commercial users will “publish ” for themselves, and content originators will become systems integrators ( proprietory and third party content integrated with process software to drive solutions), as well as sellers of key standard pieces of functionality.
In the course of time those who survive these troubled media years will be publishing fluently to all of the networks. I do hope the Guardian is one of them. And I am certain that by then the hegemony of the keyboard will have been broken, and we shall be communicating with these platforms in the most natural mode possible – our Voices.
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.
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